Lock & Key

by Gordon Bonnet

  “It’s fine. And I’m not planning on dying.”

  “No one does.”

  There didn’t seem to be any arguing with that, so he set his attention to his breakfast.

  And although he had really meant it when he told Gillette that he wasn’t planning on dying—and he really believed that Fischer’s computer was reasonably reliable about getting him back to the Library before he was messily murdered—when it came right down to it, he was reluctant to set out. For one thing, it was still drizzling, and an icy wind was sneaking through the cracks in the walls. For another, Gillette’s tavern was the most homelike place he’d been to yet. The 1840s weren’t so far removed from 2016, despite the lack of electricity and indoor plumbing. It brought home to him all that he had lost about the familiar modern world. Leaving meant plunging headfirst back into the unknown.

  But finally, there was no way to avoid it any longer. He pushed his plate and mug back, and stood up, wiping his hands on his pants. This seemed to be the convention. Nineteenth century Kentucky had apparently yet to invent the napkin dispenser.

  “Heading out, are you?” Gillette said pleasantly. “Well, I’m mighty sorry to see you go, Mister Ault. It’s been a pleasure. We don’t get much excitement around here, and I must say, it was nice seeing someone gettin’ the best of them ruffians for once. Although here you go, throwin’ your life away by givin’ them a second chance. Sure I can’t talk you out of it?”

  “No, sorry. I’ve got to see if I can rescue Brother Zebulon.”

  “I figured. It’s a pity. I’ll let your cousin Josiah know you’re dead next time I see him.”

  He gave a harsh sigh. “I’m not going to die. And incidentally, Josiah’s not my cousin.”

  Gillette’s broad brow creased with confusion. “I thought you said…”

  “Never mind what I said. It’s complicated, and I’m not going to explain it. In any case, I’ve got to go, so I’ll just say thank you for the food and lodging. I really appreciate it. And look after Jane, okay? I mean, I’m sure she’ll be fine with Mister and Missus Thurston, but so far, she’s had a hell of a life, and she’s a nice woman. She deserves better. A lot better.”

  “I’ll see that she’s taken care of,” Gillette said. “But you don’t need to worry. Tom and Elizabeth Thurston are good folk. They’ll treat her like a daughter.”

  He shook Gillette’s hand, they said their farewells, and he exited into the damp, frigid drizzle, forcing himself to give only one rueful backward glance at the inn, with its warm food and goose down quilts, as he trudged up the road toward the forest.

  The woods were silent, with no sound but the steady hiss of the rain. All of the normal noises—animals rustling, birds singing, the hundred little natural sounds that were ordinarily omnipresent—seemed stilled, as if all of the denizens of the forest were hiding until the sun came out. It amped up his nerves until they tingled. He found himself listening for sounds of pursuit, for the stealthy creep of feet in the underbrush as an unseen assailant paralleled his movement up the road, waiting for the right moment to attack. He strained his ears until he had a headache, and more than once had to force himself to relax when he realized he was clenching his fists and his jaw as if in preparation for an assault.

  Three hours passed, and the assault never came. The creek trickled its way along the road, running the opposite way, downhill toward the river that passed beside the village of Concord. There was a point, he remembered, where the creek crossed the road, and he’d had to step across on wide, flat stones that had undoubtedly been laid in the water for that purpose. That was where Brother Zebulon was being held, where he would try to set him free, perhaps at the cost of his own freedom.

  At this point, he was almost ready to welcome them killing him, if all it did was send him back to the Library. He wiped the rainwater out of his eyes to no apparent effect. But what if they decided to torture him first? Could he deal with being tortured? And yet, here he was, walking into a situation where there was at least one guy who probably would love to retaliate against him for Jane’s having kicked him in the balls, most likely by removing his.

  Maybe Gillette was right. There was no rational reason to do this. After all, by the twenty-first century, Brother Zebulon would be long dead, and he would still be long dead no matter what was accomplished here. Maybe he should see if there was a way to get back to the Library without going through all of this.

  But some habit of perseverance, some unsuspected streak of courage he’d developed since he’d been launched on this bizarre adventure, wouldn’t let him turn back. He was certain that somehow, he had to get back to Murrell’s men, and do his best to rescue Brother Zebulon, whatever the cost to himself.

  He slogged his way to the top of a hill, and looked down the slope ahead of him. The road, dim in the gray half-light, wound its way between the trees, and ahead he glimpsed a hint of movement—the creek, tumbling along in its gravelly bed. Somewhere near here, the letter had said, Murrell’s men would be waiting for him.

  He shuddered. The rain continued to fall. He was already soaked through and chilled to the bone, and the water dripped from his hair into his eyes. His leather shoes were caked with globs of ice-cold mud.

  Also, he had to pee. Should have taken care of that sooner. He wasn’t doing it now, that was for damn sure. Just his luck, Crenshaw would pop out from behind a tree while he had his pants down.

  He started walking again, slowly, waiting for something to happen—being tackled by Mosher and Johnson, a knife point in the back, Crenshaw’s nasty laugh. He reached the creek after five minutes’ slow plod downhill, and stood there for a while, watching the water flow.

  The rain continued to fall. And nothing continued to happen.

  He swore under his breath, and stomped across the creek. One of the stepping stones turned under his foot, and his left leg plunged up to the knee in freezing cold water. He yelped, swore again, and ended up with his right leg in the creek while trying to extract the left one. Finally he was able to get back up onto the stepping stone, and sloshed his way up on to the other bank.

  Now his teeth chattered uncontrollably. He stood there, looking around, hugging himself miserably, and trying to figure out what to do next.

  Finally, all of the accumulated tension from the past days seemed to burst inside him. He looked around him, at the wet, dripping, bare trees, the muddy road, and the creek with its three big stepping stones, and he leaned back his head and yelled, “Hey! Whoever is waiting here! You’d better show yourself, or kill me, or something, because I’m sick and damned tired of standing here in the rain! Come on, you said you’d meet me here. Where the hell are you?”

  No one answered.

  And that was when a hand grabbed him by the upper arm.

  He took a big breath to give a shout, but his captor’s other hand went over his mouth, and all he said was, “Mmmmph!”

  An annoyed voice whispered, “Jesus and all the saints, do you want to get yourself killed?”

  Jane.

  She took her hand from his mouth, and regarded him with one eyebrow raised quizzically. “What were you thinking, shouting like that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I felt like I had to do something. There’s no one here.”

  “Well, shouting, ‘Please come kill me’ isn’t very smart.”

  “It might be easier to get it over with.”

  She shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. You haven’t seen any sign of them?”

  “No. And how did you find out? About…” He stopped, not knowing how else to explain her presence, but not wanting to mention Brother Zebulon’s kidnapping explicitly in case she didn’t have the whole story.

  “How did I know Murrell had taken my father?” she said, her hazel eyes betraying no emotion. “Elizabeth Thurston told me. She heard it from the wife of one of the men who was there last night when you received Murrell’s letter.”

  “Ah.” He looked at her in what he fancied was
a stern fashion. “You should have stayed home. It’s not safe.”

  “Really?” She laughed lightly. “And let you have all of the fun? You sorely misjudge me. Also, if we succeed, this will even the score considerably between my father and me. I couldn’t let such an opportunity pass.”

  “But where are they?” he said, glancing around. “The letter said they’d be here, at the creek crossing east of McCaskill’s mill. That’s here, right?”

  “That’s here,” Jane said. “But as far as where they are, that I do not know.”

  They proceeded slowly up the farther bank, and still saw nothing more than trees, rocks, and mud. His wet trouser legs stiffened as the water in them gradually froze.

  This was idiotic. If they weren’t here, they could be anywhere in the woods. And searching for them on foot would be impossible.

  But then, off in the woods to the right, they heard a familiar voice shout, “Truly I say unto you, God knows what you have done!” before subsiding into quieter tones whose words were lost against the white noise of the creek and the drizzle.

  Jane’s head turned, like a hound scenting a hare. “Father.”

  “Brother Zebulon!” he breathed, and before she could stop him or he could stop himself, he sprinted off into the woods toward the voice.

  He wasn’t sure what he planned to do, whether he intended to fight the ruffians hand-to-hand until he won or they did, or to try to convince them to honor Murrell’s terms and let Brother Zebulon go. In his chilled, exhausted, anxious brain, all he could think of was that he had to get to the ruffians first, before they saw Jane—that he had to keep them from finding out that she had come along.

  He burst into a small clearing, where two dozen men stood. Brother Zebulon, still wearing his straw hat and white suit—now muddied and much bedraggled—stood on some kind of raised platform, with his back to the trunk of a tree.

  Darren gaped for a minute, and then shoved his way through the crowd of men around him, shouting, “No! Don’t hang him! I’m here! You have to let him go!”

  Two dozen faces turned toward him in frank puzzlement. His former bed mates, Mosher and Johnson, were among them.

  Mosher gave him a confused, gap-toothed grin. “What the hell you yellin’ about? Hang the Reverend? Why the hell would I hang the Reverend?”

  He looked around him, his thoughts bouncing from the inside of his skull as if trying to find a coherent explanation to catch on to, and failing. Finally, he looked up at Brother Zebulon, who gave him an angelic smile, and it was only then that he saw that Brother Zebulon didn’t, in fact, have a rope around his neck.

  “My son, you shouldn’ta troubled about me. The Lord has his hand over my head.” Brother Zebulon gave a sweeping gesture around him. “You are looking at the latest converts to the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ Risen and Triumphant Through Suffering.”

  As if to illustrate the fervor of their newfound beliefs, one of Brother Zebulon’s converts reared back and socked the man next to him in the jaw. The recipient of the punch went down like a sack of corn.

  “Whoo-eee!” shouted someone else. “Damn, Cooley, that was a good’un!”

  “Hallelujah!” yelled someone else. “Praise Jesus!”

  “I like this a hell of a lot better than them Methodists,” the man who’d thrown the punch said, rubbing his hand and grinning, displaying far less than the standard-issue number of teeth. “Them Methodists don’t talk about nothin’ but singin’ hymns and avoiding demon rum. Brother Zeb here is the genuine article.”

  Brother Zebulon smiled over his flock of new devotees.

  Darren, on the other hand, felt like he’d been hit in the solar plexus. “I came all this way, in the rain, and I didn’t even need to, because you’d all converted?”

  Jane, who had come up silently behind him, whispered into his ear, “Not all. Where’s Crenshaw? And Murrell?”

  A chill that the rain and the wind were insufficient to explain shuddered its way down his backbone. “Maybe they ran off when the rest of the men found religion.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “Neither of them would ever give up. Not when there was a reason for revenge.”

  “Well, then, since your father is safe, maybe we should get ourselves out of here before they find us.”

  “That’s not a bad thought.” She turned to one of the men nearby—it was Darren’s scraggly-bearded captor, Johnson—and said, “Do you know where Crenshaw is?”

  Johnson looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Why you wanna know?”

  “So we can avoid him.”

  Johnson stared at her, his mouth hanging open a little, and finally seemed to come to the conclusion that her answer was acceptable. “Oh, as for Crenshaw, he got mighty angry at the lot of us when we decided we wasn’t gonna hurt Brother Zeb, here. We was supposed to torture him a little bit—you know, just so’s when y’all showed up, y’all’d know we meant business. But then Brother Zeb started talkin’ to us about the Word of the Lord, and we all realized the error of our ways.” Johnson put his hand over his heart. “So we beat the shit outta Crenshaw, and he took off toward Reverend Murrell back at the camp.”

  “Murrell’s still there, then?” she asked.

  “He was took real bad last night,” Johnson said. “He wasn’t in no shape to oversee the festivities, here, so he sent Crenshaw to do it. I ‘spect that he and Crenshaw are plannin’ together right now, tryin’ to figure out how they’ll get the better of us and string up poor Brother Zeb. But they ain’t gonna do it, are they, boys?”

  A cheer went up from the assembled group.

  “So, you’ll be all right, Father?” she said to Brother Zebulon.

  Brother Zebulon was in a fine mood, no surprise given that if things had gone differently, he’d be very shortly due to be hanged from the tree he was standing next to. He looked down at his daughter with an indulgent smile.

  “Don’t you worry yourself none, child,” he said. “I’ve more’n doubled my congregation in one go, and we’re soon to head off to Tennessee with our newfound converts. When I get back to Concord, we’ll pack up and leave.” He looked up to the gray sky, which spat rain, and said, “After your dear mother and brothers and sisters and I have finished giving thanks for my miraculous delivery from death.”

  “I think that’s our cue to leave,” Darren said.

  She nodded.

  They turned away from Brother Zebulon and his flock, and headed back toward the road. The rain was slowing down, but the wind had picked up, and the temperature was dropping. From the feel of it, there would be a hard freeze once the sun went down, and he was determined to be back in Concord by nightfall, now that his task of rescuing Brother Zebulon had been rendered irrelevant. The thought of the goose down quilt waiting for him in his room in Gillette’s inn was enough to propel his feet forward.

  After a few minutes’ walk, he said, “I hope those ruffians don’t turn on your father.”

  “I doubt they’d hurt him,” she said. “Rob him and run away, once they realize that he’s not going to find them sport the way Murrell did. But he has precious little to steal in any case. Once they get tired of hitting each other and shouting hallelujah, I suspect that they’ll vanish one by one.” She shook her head. “It’s what happens to most of his converts. They seldom last long.”

  “I wouldn’t imagine.”

  “What about you, Mister I-Came-From-The-Future? Where will you go now? Has the disaster you were sent to fix been averted?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe that it was rescuing your father from Murrell, but it looks like he took care of that one on his own.”

  “How will you get back home, wherever home is?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess I have to wait until the people in charge bring me back.”

  Except that he didn’t have a home. Everyone was gone. The Library might be comfortable, but he couldn’t stay there forever. And in any case, if he failed to bring back the human race, the Board of Directors
was going to fire Fischer and Maggie, and then where would he be?

  Suddenly, a terrifying image came to mind. What if everything and every place in the world still existed, but all the people were gone? He pictured the entire city of Seattle, all of the businesses and homes and apartment buildings and cafés and roads… all empty. Food still sitting on tables, never to be eaten, belongings dropped in place as the people who held them disappeared, papers being blown down streets filled with empty cars still sitting in the middle of roads…

  He’d never given it any thought. Even after he’d accepted that Fischer was telling the truth, that what Lee had done had somehow made the entirety of humanity disappear, he didn’t consider what had happened to everything else. Did the whole Earth vanish, too, or was everything still there, just abandoned? The latter seemed like one of the most horrifying thoughts he had ever had.

  And so it was that he was once more lost in thought when he was tackled from the side and knocked sprawling, landing flat on his back in the mud. A gobbet of mud spattered his glasses, and Jane screamed. A knee made solid contact with his gut, and his breath was expelled in a whoosh.

  “Well, look here who we got. If it ain’t the schoolmaster and Miss Bell, out for a nice stroll in the rain.”

  The blurred outline of Crenshaw’s face grinned down at him. He had both of Darren’s wrists pinned to the ground.

  Crenshaw, however, looked like he hadn’t been having an easy time of it. His right ear was torn and bleeding, and there was also blood around his mouth. One eye was swollen and already beginning to blacken. Most likely the results of the fight between Crenshaw and Murrell’s men.

  “I told you, you asshole,” he gasped out, “I’m not a schoolmaster.”

  “Well, whatever you are, you’ll be dead soon, so it don’t make a difference.”

  He struggled to free himself, but Crenshaw leaned on him, and laughed in his face. “You a prayin’ man? You might want to say one or two.”