The Histories of Earth, Books 1-4: In the Window Room, A Prince of Earth, All the Worlds of Men, and Worlds Unending

by Steven J. Carroll

  Pointing and gesturing, because he could not speak proper Turkish, Timothy motioned that he would like a simit (which is a toasted roll of bread, like a bagel, only fresher tasting than a bagel, and simply wonderful; Worth the long walk from his parents’ rented apartment suite every morning, and the overcrowded Grand Bazaar).

  ���Gida, l��tfen,��� Timothy said pointing (which is what he thought meant ‘bread, please’, but what it actually means is ‘food, please’). And then to be polite, he said ���thank you��� in English, because the Turkish equivalent was rather impossible.

  A bump.

  An almost unnoticeable bump, but for someone as well trained as Timothy was, after spending a year’s time being closely mentored by the best swordsmen and knights in Gleomu, a simple nudge can bear a thousand meanings, and he knew this particular style of nudge to be most like a pickpocket’s diversion.

  His year of early morning training immediately kicked in, for it had never really left him. His hand snatched up another boy’s hand, as quickly as you would need to, if you were to catch a water glass out of midair, while still retaining each droplet.

  The other boy looked serious faced and unfrightened. He wore a small wool cap, at the time, and thick gold metallic bracelets clasped around his forearms, and he held a folded note in his hand. So that Timothy knew instantly that the boy had not meant to pickpocket him, but had rather intended to secretly deliver a message.

  ���Let me go,��� the boy said blankly, and with wide eyes that seemed as though they were always that way.

  ���What do you want?��� Timothy quickly answered back, not loosening his grip even the slightest, but happy to discover this messenger spoke perfect English.

  ���You are in danger,��� the boy said, softly, ���and now we both are. Because they will see this.���

  Timothy pondered at his words for a brief second, and then with his free hand he swiped the letter out of the messenger’s hand, and then let the boy’s wrist go.

  ���Who will see this?��� Timothy asked, not caring to lower his voice like the other boy had.

  The messenger glanced over his shoulder, while rubbing his sore wrist.

  ���Just stay away from the museum,��� he said, taking a step back, and then another.

  A man in a turban and large robe passed between them, and in the blink of an eye the boy was gone, running at a top notch sprint away from Timothy, through the covered tunnel-like halls of the bazaar. The boy’s sneakered footsteps echoed, but were lost to the noise of the crowd.

  The boy was well ahead of him, but Timothy was also a fine runner. (If you’ve lived a life without cars and tube trains for a year, then you will learn to get to places in a hurry, by running and walking.)

  Sprinting through the halls at a lightning speed, dodging women carrying brightly colored cloth to market, past tourists with their visitor maps and tethered sunglasses hung around their necks; Timothy’s own footsteps echoed in time with the messenger boy’s, as they twisted through the maze work of halls, and escaped through the decoratively curved entryway of the bazaar, out into the busy Turkish streets.

  A dented and rusted hatchback car zoomed through the intersection ahead of them, stopping the mysterious boy in mid-sprint. Feet pounding on the pavement, Timothy was gaining ground, only twenty feet behind him. As they ran at their restless speed, the messenger boy seemed to be fumbling in his back pants pocket for something. He turned sharply, into a rising side alleyway. Timothy turned nearly as quickly.

  No one.

  The alley was deserted. Huge stone steps that led up past closed wooden doors, but entirely empty, not even the echo of footsteps. Timothy had not been far behind, seven or eight paces at the most. With what he knew of our modern world, Timothy understood this to be a physical impossibility. The messenger boy had vanished, absolutely vanished.

  And for the first time, Timothy let himself take in very winded breaths. Apparently, he had not been running as intensely, nor as frequently, since returning to earth. And thankfully, the alleyway was completely empty, so that he knew he would not be seen.

  Yet, after a few more moments he realized that the messenger boy’s note was still crumpled in his hand. He unfolded its sweaty creases and read it aloud to himself (not for any real reason, this just seemed to be one of those notes that people read aloud).

  ���You are not safe.

  Meet me tonight.

  Stay away from the museum.���

  Chapter Two

  The Vanishing Boy

  ���And he just vanished?��� she reiterated.

  Timothy’s mother, Agatha Hayfield, was sitting at a circular table in their lavish open hotel suite, while Timothy was pacing the floor.

  ���Yes, mother, that’s what I said, ‘vanished,’ ��� Timothy repeated, but not in his normal respectful way, being so shaken by the experience.

  Timothy’s father, Thomas Hayfield, sat on a low sofa, with his customary cigar half burned in his mouth. He lifted up an eyebrow so that Timothy would know not to use that tone with his mother. And he was buttoning the cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt, as he spoke, ���I tell you, Agatha, I don’t like it,��� Thomas said, rising from his seat and adjusting a pair of red-colored suspenders.

  ���We arrive here for the performance, and Timothy just so happens to be invited to the Archeology Museum, on the same morning a vanishing boy tells him to avoid such a place.��� Timothy’s father drew his cigar from his mouth and dusted the falling ashes into a bowl. ���Sounds fishy to me…��� he said.

  Their balcony door was left wide open, overlooking the ancient bustling seaside metropolis. The sounds of taxicabs, and of men calling for theirs in front of the hotel, lofted into the room.

  ���Now, Tim, I don’t want you going anywhere near that museum, or that boy. It’s not safe. Do you hear me?��� Agatha said, pointing a slender finger at her son.

  ���No, no,��� Thomas called out, speaking with his cigar in his hand, so that the wisps of smoke flew up around his mustached face. ���Of course it’s not safe, my love. But if we are ever to have any answers about this other world, and what has happened to our son, then we may need to ask hard questions, and to some unsafe people.���

  Agatha placed both her hands flatly onto the table in front of her, her expression severely overwhelmed. ���I just… I don’t like it,��� she said.

  Thomas came to kiss his wife’s cheek, and lifted his patched-elbowed, tan-colored coat from off the back of the chair beside hers.

  ���Well, I don’t like it anymore than you do, my dear,��� Thomas said, standing at the table with his coat folded over his arm. ���But if the vanishing boy is afraid of these people, whoever they are, then there’s no way of us getting past them.���

  ���I could hide,��� Timothy said, pacing back toward his parents. ���I could go back home to London, or stay with grandmother and grandfather in Mayfield-���

  ���And hide from whom?��� his father asked.

  ���We’ve no idea, how many of these people there are, nor where they are. And like I said, if the vanishing boy’s frightened of them, then there’s no getting past them… And so, we’ll need to be a little unsafe, for our better good. I say, you meet with him tonight.���

  ���Thomas?!��� Agatha gasped. ���I’m surprised at you.��� And she stood up, pointing at Timothy, ���You would put our son in danger like that?��� And Agatha’s face was sternly cross.

  With his cigar burning between his fingers, and with his coat still draped over his arm, Thomas held his wife by the shoulders. ���I’m not placing him in danger, dear. They are… whoever they is,��� he said.

  And all at once, it seemed, the stress of that evening, and what had built up over the last two years, had grown to be too much for Timothy’s mothe
r, who broke down in tears, there in their luxury Turkish suite. She wrapped her arms in a deep hug around her husband, and was looking at Timothy as she spoke, very tearful eyed.

  ���Things were so good, you know…��� she sobbed. ���After he’s come back, I’d hoped we’d be a normal family again…��� and her clear words were lost in tears.

  ���It’s alright, mum,��� Timothy said, appearing to be regaining some of his familiar courage from his days in Gleomu. ���I’ve been through worse than this.���

  And Agatha left her husband, and went to Timothy, cupping his face in her hands.

  ���How did you get to be so brave?��� she said, lovingly quiet, like there had been no one else in the room.

  But Timothy held his tongue, he knew exactly how he’d got to be so brave. It was through practice, many dangers all clumped together in a long line, so that he hadn’t any choice but to develop bravery. But this information he’d safeguarded from his mother. There was a lot she still hadn’t known about his adventures in that distant world, and he thought it best for her sanity that she might never know.

  Thomas made a little clearing noise with his throat, to gather both of their attentions.

  And he spoke this last part in a grumble, because he held his cigar in his lips as he spoke. ���Would you allow it, if I went with him?��� Thomas asked.

  Chapter Three

  A Necessary Danger

  Timothy’s mother did allow it, but she did not appreciate it. Saying exactly, that she did ���not appreciate, you two running off in the middle of the night. It’s not safe.��� Which was a true enough statement. It was not safe, but necessary. A necessary danger, on a road that may eventually lead to safety, but even that was not promised.

  And so, Timothy and his father, Thomas Hayfield, who was dressed up nicely in a stylish leisure suit, left their rented apartment in the downtown of Turkish society, and went walking in the midnight hours through the emptied foreign streets. Having no real set path, or rendezvous point of which to speak of, they continued on toward the general direction of the Grand Bazaar, and the place where the vanishing boy had last been seen.

  The city streets were swept clean of pedestrians and very dark, and every so often a passing car would drive before them or behind them, illuminating their shadowed faces, when all they’d wanted more than anything was to be left completely hidden.

  It was an intrusive feeling, uncomfortable, to know that you were being watched, and that there was an unnamed group of people after you, and that they could be any passing car or light in an open window.

  During a space of relative darkness, when there were no passing cars to betray their poorly secretive mission, Timothy began to think of a very decent question.

  He spoke to his father in hushed tones, who was leading on ahead of him, ���Who do you think they are? Do you think they’ve been watching us for long?���

  Thomas Hayfield tightened his lips, so that the length of his mustache stretched further down upon his face, for he was about to say something rather unsettling.

  ���I would guess, powerful people,��� his father said. ���People who might think themselves above laws and governances.���

  Their footsteps made a subtle scraping against the sanded beige stoned avenues.

  And as they continued Timothy began to remember his grandmother’s warning, before their group had left Gleomu nearly a year prior, preparing to make their return to Earth. How she had said, that they’d needed to keep their secret safe from everyone. And how, that if men like Darius had existed in Gleomu, then they had certainly existed on Earth, and that they would not have the high walls of Ismere to hide behind.

  However, as soon as they’d landed back on Earth, the reporters came in as vultures, and who could fault them for it: After all, the job of reporters is to find stories such as theirs, and a headline story about a mysterious unrecorded wind storm in Mayfield, that had ripped away an upstairs attic in the middle of the night, was more than irresistible. And then, the three miracle survivors returning after more than a year’s time, along with Wilbur Wolcott, ���the man brought back from the dead,��� or the ���Lazarus man��� as some papers had called him, and all four of them suffering from an unexplainable amnesia. The whole story reeked of a delicious scandal (and not to mention that one of the survivors had been the son of Thomas Hayfield, the actor).

  And for months on end, it was what Timothy (and his parents and grandparents, and Barbara and her family) had been forced to endure, daily, until a better and more intriguing scandal had come along.

  And then this horrid thought occurred to Timothy, ���What about Barbara, and grandmother and grandfather, do you think they’re in danger also?��� he asked.

  Yet not turning, and walking in full stride as he spoke, Thomas said, ���Even I’m in danger, I shouldn’t wonder.���

  And the passing of a car shone its blinding diamond white light in their faces.

  If anyone had fared the worst in their return to Earth it was Barbara, and with only two weeks left until they were all to be reflected back to Gleomu, back to their new globe, hidden within the underground cavern that Timothy had found, her good patience was beginning to wear desperately thin. Yet to help alleviate some of her ill temper she had, nearly since she’d arrived again at her parents’ home in Oxford, she’d kept a calendar of her remaining days on Earth, etching a massive permanent red circle around the date October 8th, and crossing heavy X’s through each day leading up to their ���escape���, which is the old name she and Timothy had used for that day. But that was back when things were much different for all of them, when ravenous reporters could be found stalking their every whim, but eventually things had returned to a more normal status for Timothy, and now Barbara often found herself more increasingly alone in her dislike for Earth.

  Though it was not that Timothy had not much rather lived in Gleomu than on Earth, it was just that he hadn’t need to deal directly with Barbara’s parents, who’d been an astonishing nightmare since she’d come back; They had forced an out-of-court settlement against Matilde and Wilbur Wolcott to amend their ���pain and suffering,��� and Barbara’s mother in particular had interrogated her every waking morning, regarding her forgotten memories of that past year. But not because she’d especially cared where her daughter had been nor what dangers she’d been involved in, she’d only been holding out hope that she might still have time to sell the exclusive rights to Barbara’s tragic story to some tabloid-esque book publisher, or movie production studio. But the bidding war had been steadily dwindling, and Barbara’s mother had grown all the more demanding.

  And so, as most nights had gone, Barbara Cholley had shut herself up in her room. And that night, even though both her parents were away at a lavishly presented high-society party, and would both be gone until much later, Barbara was still locked away in her room, finding it to be a well ingrained habit by now, and one that was horridly difficult to break.

  It was a dark sort of night, and she was reclining on her bed, thumbing through old fashion articles, when she should have been reviewing her notes for an upcoming quiz in her Physics course, when suddenly there arose a knock at the door. The house echoed with the sound of it. And while wrapping a coat over her shoulders, and taking footsteps down the spiraled staircase from her room, she had begun to get a sickly feeling about this knock, and had mostly wished that she had stayed locked up in her room, instead of answering the door to a stranger, so late at night, completely alone in her parents’ vacant estate. (But those are the sorts of feelings one can overlook, when a house is especially creepy, and if they have a mind to.)

  A shadow on the doorstep, that she saw through the hazy rippled window glass. And she cracked the door open so that only her face would show, and found on her porch step, an elegant woman in a wide brim grey hat, and suit dress. The woman held a simple le
ather briefcase.

  ���Excuse me, miss. Are your parents home, by chance?��� the woman asked, ever so politely.

  However, Barbara had known about false kindnesses, after seeing so much of it from her mother, enough to know that this was a very foul woman, and that she should have stayed upstairs, locked in her bedroom.

  Chapter Four

  The Alleyway

  The two had come into the rising alleyway, with its long terraced steps, and closed doors. There was nothing observantly special about the place, a regular alley that could be passed by without a moment’s thought.

  The place was filled with quiet stillness. The wind did not move at all between the buildings, and the regular city noises seemed to be kept back from that off-beaten path.

  After some minutes of waiting beneath the white moonlight, Timothy returned to the edge of the alley, to have a look up and down the street, to see if anyone had been watching them, or if anyone were coming to meet them. And he thought of all the many other place, where the vanishing boy might have gone to wait for them.

  ���Maybe we got here too late,��� Timothy said aloud, speaking over his shoulder, to his father who was seated on an alley step behind him. ���Or he’s not-���

  The slightest noise of footsteps.

  Timothy turned back to find that the vanishing boy had suddenly reappeared, like the breath of a wind, just behind his father, and without either of them seeing where he’d come from.

  ���-Not coming,��� Timothy said, finishing his previous thought.

  Timothy’s father also heard the subtle footsteps directly behind him, and he leapt up from his seat on the step, utterly amazed. ���I say, you sure can make an entrance, can’t you?��� he muttered, taking a few more steps back from that strange boy, but only because he’d been caught so unaware.

  ���You should have come alone,��� the boy said, speaking to Timothy. The vanishing boy was dressed in a white t-shirt and blue jeans, and wore his customary serious expression, along with those same golden bracelets strapped upon his forearms.