The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  After a time she draws a breath and straightens. “Forgive me. It has been a difficult day.” She fumbles inside the folds of her skirt. “I have something for you.”

  Peter accepts the small book that she offers, noticing the expensive weight of the leather binding. “What’s this?”

  “It was written six hundred years ago, by an Italian named Dante Alighieri.” She smiles at him. “As a girl I was never fond of it. Since arriving here, though, it has been very much in my thoughts.”

  Peter looks away from her and turns to the first page, reading Midway upon the journey of life

  I found myself within a forest dark

  For the straightforward pathway

  had been lost.

  Beneath her gaze, he becomes conscious of how slowly his finger moves across the lines of text and stops.

  “Thank you,” he says, hoping she can’t see how strangely this gift has moved him. It suddenly occurs to him to wonder where the book might have come from, if she’s really as penniless as she claims. After a moment, though, he decides not to ask—not now, at least. “Maybe I’ve felt that way myself.”

  “Within a dark forest . . . ?”

  “Something like that.”

  She studies his face, caught off guard by his statement and the previously unconsidered possibility that she and the mechanic might have something in common, although they clearly come from different worlds and speak different languages.

  He closes the book and sets it aside on one of the workbenches, among the tools and oily rags, then looks up and meets her eyes. This time, after a moment, she is the one who looks away.

  “You hungry?”

  “Yes.” She nods, the emptiness in her stomach too acute for her to listen to the shreds of her dignity that remain. She watches as he unwraps a paper parcel containing a loaf of coarse bread and a wedge of cheese. He rummages in a drawer and finds a rusty knife, which he wipes on his trouser leg before cutting two portions and handing her the larger.

  They eat in silence. She forces herself to take small bites, glancing up at him occasionally. Each time, she catches him watching her with a questioning look on his face, and each time he looks away.

  Outside the workshop a car backfires, and she jumps.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.” She shakes her head, settling back onto the stool. “Only nerves.” For an instant, she has a vision of herself as she must look to the mechanic: a young woman with tangled hair and grimy features, sneaking, frightened, and alone—and she feels a surge of hatred for this pitiful person who wears her face. A moment later, though, as she leans closer to the fire’s warmth, these battering fears recede by a few degrees.

  “Nerves?” He peers at her. “What’s got you nervous?”

  “I—” she stops, draws a breath, and forces herself to continue. “Ever since I arrived here—since I traveled through time—I have been afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?” Peter leans toward her, feeling a jolt of excitement even as he recognizes this as more evidence that she’s lost her mind.

  “I hardly know. Nothing, really.” She shakes her head. “Everything. Sometimes it has seemed to me as if I am being watched and followed. At other times it feels as if I simply do not belong here. As if my presence were an offense against the laws of nature in some way.” She bites her lip, staring into the fire.

  In fact, sitting in the warm enclosure of the dingy workshop beside the mechanic, these words sound faintly ridiculous in her own ears. She is startled to realize how much this setting and this man have come to feel familiar—a reaction, she reminds herself, she cannot afford to trust.

  Peter leans back and tries to digest all of this. Yet again he finds himself at a loss, not because of the basic craziness of her story—lunacy is common enough—but because she doesn’t act like a crazy person. Even though he doesn’t know much about high society, the way she carries herself and her speech seem more like something out of a ballroom than from an asylum. And if she is rational, he tells himself, there should be some set of words that will make everything come clear. But what those words might be, he can’t begin to guess.

  “But people don’t travel through time.” He shakes his head. “Have you thought maybe you’re wrong about all this? That maybe you imagined it?”

  “Of course.” She looks away, wondering why his disbelief—exactly what she herself would feel in his place—still wounds her.

  “Couldn’t you go to the police? They might help somehow?” Even as he offers this suggestion, Peter recognizes the impossibility of the idea; hard to imagine any kind of authority taking her seriously, even discounting the notorious abuses and unreliability of the city police force.

  “I am inclined to doubt they would believe me.” She smiles humorlessly. “Besides which, my family was never a favorite of the government of this country.”

  “What do you—” He leans back, trying to digest this statement. “What do you mean?”

  “Our situation was always politically precarious. My father managed to win the sympathy of Grover Cleveland, but”—she sighs wearily, gazing into the fire—“he always had a gift for choosing the wrong horse. When Harrison was reelected as president, he promised to solve the ‘Ohio Problem,’ as they described my family and the Kingdom.”

  Peter frowns. “But Cleveland won.”

  She turns to peer at him, a startled expression on her face. “No. You are wrong. If he had won the election, I probably would not be sitting here now.”

  For a moment their gazes lock and he feels a shiver of something like electricity run down his spine. Then Peter looks away, confronted again by the basic fact of her craziness as he remembers his father’s enthusiasm for “Uncle Jumbo,” the plainspoken Democrat who would drive the elitist Republicans out of Washington, where they had held sway since the Civil War, bringing prosperity to the workingman. How his father had grieved when President Cleveland declined to run for a third term against McKinley, who sits in the White House now.

  Neither of them says anything for a time. The fire on the stove crackles and collapses in a swarm of sparks.

  She looks at his hands, callused and stained, and tries to picture him at work in the subway excavations. She thinks of the endless labor he has been part of, clawing through bedrock beneath the weight of the city, and shudders.

  At the same time, there’s something about the tunnels that makes her feel strangely drawn to them. To the darkness and stillness of the safe, unchanging world underground they will represent, once they are completed. And then a possibility occurs to her, an idea of such staggering scale that for an instant all the terror and uncertainty of her present situation briefly vanish, swept aside by sheer scientific curiosity. She has to restrain herself from jumping to her feet. Struggling to keep her voice level, she turns to Peter.

  “Mr. Force, I am grateful for all you have done already. But I wonder if I might ask for one thing more—a small thing.”

  “And what’s that?” Money, he thinks.

  “To see the subway tunnels.”

  Startled, he glances at her—she stares back at him innocently. Despite this, Peter feels a jolt of paranoia. Recalling the guards outside the construction site and the daily searches, he remembers the rumors he’s heard about attempts to sabotage the subway project: a rash of mistimed explosives and broken machines, blamed on the schemes of the omnibus-line owners, anarchists, or maybe—here Peter stumbles, recalling the chaos of a few hours ago—the work of men like his friend, like Tobias.

  “Why do you want to see them?” he asks. “Not much to look at down there.”

  She tries to match his bland tone. “As a scientist, how could I not be curious?”

  Her eyes and face are somehow urging him to agree—but with an effort, he shakes his head. “Workmen come early, and no visitors allowed. Besides, it’s dangerous.”

  “Then you won’t?”

  “Can’t.”

  She nods and looks back
at the fire. He feels the withdrawal of her gaze as a physical loss. The dark curtain of her hair swings forward, obscuring all but the line of her profile. With this movement something tumbles from the neckline of her dress and Peter catches a glimpse of silver, a pendant on a chain that she conceals again before he can see it clearly. He begins to form a question about the necklace—which, like the book, doesn’t make sense if she’s truly a vagrant here—but she speaks first.

  “Mr. Force, may I say something to you in confidence?”

  He waits, feeling poised on a knife edge.

  “Have you considered that the subway excavations might serve some larger purpose?”

  “What?” The word escapes Peter before he has a chance to think, as Neumann’s slurred voice comes back to him: a secret meaning in their shape . . .

  “Think of a bird in flight, Mr. Force, trying to land on a moving train. Again and again, the rushing motion of the train sweeps it from its perch. This would be the exact problem encountered by a time traveler.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks weakly.

  “In the same way that an aeronaut or sailor must contemplate his eventual point of landing, a traveler through time would have to do the same.” She realizes how flimsy all of this must sound to him—but of course, she reflects, he is already convinced that her whole story is insane, so what more harm can be done?

  She forces herself to continue. “If you were to travel to the past or the future, what would stop you from materializing inside a wall, or in front of a galloping horse? You would need to somehow find a safe place, an anchorage that would remain secure.”

  “So you think the subway diggings . . . ?”

  “Perhaps. It is only a thought that came to me, just now.”

  For an instant Peter remembers the strange objects that have been uncovered in the excavations, like the enormous unidentifiable bones unearthed by the crew on Broadway—but this is madness, he reminds himself, shaking the thought away. “But there’d be trains in those tunnels. Sounds even more dangerous than a horse or a wall?”

  She nods—because he is right, of course, she sees. Still, somehow, she can’t quite abandon this idea, and the image of the silent excavations continues to tug at her.

  That night, as they repeat their awkward bedtime ritual, he finds himself unable to believe her but also unable to completely disbelieve: her fantasy is so elaborate, so complete. It is like a game she is playing, he thinks, or a contest of wills between the two of them—to see who will drop their defenses, look away, and blink first.

  Even so, Peter reminds himself, lying in his cot and listening for the sound of her breathing, it’s also a game that’s gone far enough. Insanity aside, there’s something that strikes him now as too convenient about their meeting and her interest in the tunnels. Because isn’t this exactly the kind of story a saboteur might use, to find a way in?

  The only way to find out, he decides, is to show her the tunnels and watch how she acts. If she tries something, he’ll be on his guard. And if she’s just plain crazy—well, tomorrow, after the tunnels, he’ll make his excuses and they’ll go their separate ways.

  COLD, and the sound of dripping water.

  Peter’s breath steams in the air and he shoves his gloved hands deeper into his pockets. Beside him she trembles, hugging her arms across her chest. Glancing over, he sees that she is more unearthly pale than ever, an unsteady brightness in her eyes. Together in the early darkness of Sunday morning, before the arrival of the excavation crews, they stand at the rough mouth of the subway tunnel on Canal Street.

  Piles of dirty ice crunch underfoot, and icicles hang from the silent motor that drives the pneumatic hammers, Peter notices with a frown, ravaging the delicate lungwork of the bellows. The buildings and near-empty streets shine pearlescent with the dawn that has just started to glow in the east. He strikes a match with numb fingers and lights the two lanterns, adjusts the wicks, and silently hands one to her. Once again he tells himself that no harm can come from just showing her the place—and, clutching this reassurance, he leads her into the bowels of the earth.

  He holds the lantern aloft, casting swinging beams of light over the rock walls, the makeshift wood pilings, and heaps of rubble. A few steps behind, she stumbles against an outcropping of stone and falls forward. He manages to turn and catch her before she hits the ground. Her lantern shatters, glass tinkling into the cavern silence.

  She gasps and clings to him for a moment. Then both remember their sense of propriety and step apart. “I—” Peter swallows, mouth suddenly gone dry. “When I started, I fell all the time.”

  She nods, starting to answer—then all at once, she feels a hidden thronging in the air around her. A sense of presence, somewhere overhead. Her scalp tingles, a shiver running through her body.

  Back. This word whispered into her ear, and she wheels to find its source—only underground gloom, jumping lantern shadows on the rough walls. A moment later, though, she hears another whisper, this time farther down the tunnel, almost inaudible, then another—

  “Do you hear that?” She grips the mechanic’s arm again, her fingers digging into his biceps.

  “Hear what?”

  She shakes her head. Something is down there, in the tunnels: she knows this with a sick certainty. Something without shape but infinitely hungry, a swarming multiplicity. A part of her brain is screaming at her to turn and leave now, before it is too late—

  “You want to go on?” Peter asks.

  Taking a breath, she tries to gather her courage. These thoughts and fears are only irrational fantasies, she reminds herself. Listening to them would be a sure sign of delusion. She nods.

  “Yes.” The word sticks in her throat.

  He offers his arm and she takes it more conventionally. Slowly, their way illuminated only by a single lantern now, they continue into the pit.

  It has been some weeks since Peter ventured into the tunnel-works, and he is startled to see that already the diggings have changed shape and grown. Neumann told him that the excavations had been expanded and hastened, but until now he had not appreciated how much. Along the length of the tunnel that leads down Canal Street, the beginnings of new side shafts have appeared at right angles to the main excavation, sloping downward. The longest of these new tunnels is still less than ten feet long—but remembering the sketch that Neumann showed him, Peter sees what they will become: a subterranean grid expanding through the city, echoing the matrix of streets above in the dark bedrock of New York.

  She stares at the walls of the cavern, up and around. A swarming buzz fills her head, making it hard to think.

  “Do you know what they plan here?” she whispers. “To what final destination the tunnels will extend?”

  Peter nods and kneels to draw with his gloved finger in the frozen stone dust on the cavern floor. “Four stacked layers. All the same, see? Here”—he points—“Canal Street, Broadway, Seventh Avenue . . .”

  She does not respond but something prompts him to look up at her. She stands rigidly, pale and trembling, staring into space.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “Four layers.” Her voice is a distant whisper. “And there will be trains running along all of them?”

  “Only the top one. The sublayers are just access tunnels, not big enough for a train.” In fact, Peter thinks, recalling the diagrams, the bottommost excavations will hardly be large enough for a man to crawl through, narrow passageways reserved for future generations of the city’s infrastructure—pneumatic tubes, telegraph wires, and the like, according to Neumann.

  “So this is it,” she murmurs, “the great trap . . .”

  “What?”

  But she ignores him. She feels the invisible presence around her, even nearer than before, straining to break through the surface of the air. She has to go—some part of her realizes these thoughts are irrational, but even more clearly she knows that if she stays, something terrible will happen. She turns and takes a staggering s
tep toward the tunnel entrance.

  “You all right?” he asks. “You look sick.”

  “No, I’m fine.” She takes another step and almost falls. He hurries to support her, and together they start toward the surface.

  “I’ll take you to the workshop,” Peter finds himself saying, despite his earlier resolution. “There’s bread, tea—”

  “No.” Impatient with his solicitude, she pulls away from him as they emerge into the light. She feels feverish with urgency now: there is so little time, she thinks, and it takes all her willpower to stay where she is.

  “Thank you for your offer, and all you have done for me already. But I must go, I have already waited too long. . . .” She turns to him, wondering if he has understood anything. After all, she tells herself, he deserves some explanation. Despite the differences between them, the mechanic is a good man: his company and generosity have kept her alive and sane these past few days. Looking at his serious face, she feels a nameless welling in her chest, and again finds herself inexplicably longing to touch him.

  And I could tell him, she thinks, that—

  But in the end, of course, nothing. Such sentences always end in silence, no matter how they may begin—indeed, this is the very essence of fate: that which we never quite manage to say. So she looks at Peter, and forces herself to smile. “I must go,” she says. “I hope I will see you again someday. Good-bye, and thank you for everything.”

  She starts to walk away, a slight figure in the morning gray. Watching her go he feels a kind of tearing inside his chest and tries to speak.

  “Wait,” he says. “Stop—”

  But she does not wait or stop or look back, and he realizes that he has been discarded. And though he might have run after her, seized her arm and tried to persuade her, this isn’t his character. So he puts his hands in his pockets and watches her walk away: through the construction site, into the city.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE SORCERER

  I’VE SPENT MY SHARE OF HOURS SITTING IN LIBRARIES AND wrestling with textbooks on mathematics and physics. But despite my efforts, the truth is that I never had much talent for those subjects. Still, there’s one small insight that occurred to me years ago, and that has haunted me ever since.