Definitely not.
For a moment, the Hitchhiker studied the staircase leading up to the second floor.
“The termites have been at work here,” he said. “Still, I think it’ll handle our weight. You’d better go first. You’re lighter than I am, and if the staircase breaks when I’m on it, I can always find another way up.”
“What if it breaks while I’m on it?”
“Then I’ll catch you.” The Hitchhiker grinned.
Just how he’d catch me, he didn’t say.
When I took my first step, the stairs creaked so loudly that the Hitchhiker and I both winced. The second step wasn’t as bad. The fifth step looked suspicious, so I skipped it, but the rest of the steps seemed solid enough.
I reached the top without any problems.
“My turn now,” the Hitchhiker said. “I’ll be right up.”
He climbed the first few steps, though they creaked more under his weight. But then he reached the fifth step. The moment he put his weight on it, the entire staircase made this terrible groan.
“Hitchhiker, look out!” I cried.
Too late. The whole staircase crashed down in a cloud of dust and wood splinters, taking the Hitchhiker with it. He didn’t have time to make that strange gesture of his and zip away to safety. It all happened too fast.
The dust was slow to settle. When it did, I peered down into the rubble.
“Hitchhiker?” I called. “Are you okay?”
Some of the wood pieces shifted, and a coughing sound came from beneath them.
“I’ll just be a moment….” The Hitchhiker’s head emerged from under one of the boards. His hand appeared next, and he placed his crumpled hat back on his head. He glanced around as if he expected to see his arms or legs in some other pile beside him. Then he rose to his feet shakily and started brushing the dust off his coat.
“I thought you were dead,” I said.
The Hitchhiker stopped and looked at me. “Fortunately, this particular Artisan is alive and well. I’ll be right there.”
He began dusting himself off again.
At the end of the upstairs hallway stood a door that was opened a crack. Probably it led to a bedroom. I wouldn’t have noticed it at all except that I heard a sound behind the door. Like a wooden drawer closing, and then a soft, metallic creak. Bedsprings, maybe.
I turned back to the Hitchhiker. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Oh, yes, quite. I’ll only need a moment.”
With the amount of dust on him, he’d probably need longer than a moment. After waiting for a few seconds, I decided to tiptoe closer to the door. With the slight opening, I could peer through the crack and see the person inside. Or at least that was the plan.
“Finder?” the Hitchhiker called from downstairs. “Is everything okay up there?”
I was far enough down the hallway that if I answered now, I might give myself away. Only a quick look, and then I could go tell the Hitchhiker what I’d seen. Besides, I was almost at the door. Just a few more steps.
“Rookie?” the Hitchhiker said again, this time more urgently.
I drew in my breath and pressed my eye against the opening of the door.
The only thing I could see was a brass bed, or at least the foot of it, with blankets that were dirty and disheveled. I tilted my head to see better, but I must have bumped the door because it swung wide open.
So much for stealth.
An old man was sitting up in the bed, staring at me with watery, sunken eyes. He was thin—impossibly thin—with straggly white hair that came down to his ears. The only thing he wore was a stained nightshirt full of rips and tears.
This was the Bandit King? This old man?
“Uh, uh,” I stammered. Honestly, was there anything a person could say at this point that wouldn’t sound awkward or embarrassing?
The man reached his shaking hand under his covers.
“I swore you’d never take me alive, Sheriff Watson,” the old man said. He drew his hand out from under his blankets, only now he was holding a revolver.
Oh, not good.
And before I had time to tell him that my name wasn’t Sheriff Watson, or that I didn’t even know who Sheriff Watson was, before I had time to step back or duck, before I even had time to breathe, the old man pointed his revolver at me and cocked the hammer.
“And by every sweet thing that’s blessed and holy,” he said, “I meant it!”
He pulled the trigger.
Chapter 28
John Ketter
A bullet wound usually hurts, right? Probably not as bad as being burned alive or disemboweled, but still…. Of all the ways to die, a gunshot wound wouldn’t exactly be a painless way to go.
So why didn’t I feel any pain?
The gun had definitely fired. I could still hear the gunshot reverberating in the tiny room, except that the sound was far away. Or maybe I was the one far away. It was hard to tell. One second, I could’ve sworn I was outside in the dead rose garden, and the next second I seemed to be inside by the collapsed staircase.
Then I was in the old man’s bedroom again, but up near the ceiling. No, I was in a crack between the floorboards. Under the bed? By the window?
What was going on?
Finally, I was standing next to the old man holding the gun, and the Hitchhiker was right beside me, clutching my left shoulder.
“I’ll take that,” the Hitchhiker said, snatching the revolver from the old man’s hands.
The old man didn’t put up any fight—he was too busy gaping at the doorway.
“Weren’t you over…didn’t I see you…how did you….” He tugged his sheets closer to his face and shook his head. Like maybe he thought he was hallucinating.
The Hitchhiker gave me a look that made me want to crawl away and hide.
“Sorry,” I said. “Thanks for saving my life.”
“Well, no lasting harm was done, I suppose,” he said, his expression gentling. “Though what I would have told the Professor if you’d been shot, I really don’t know.”
He unloaded the revolver’s bullets, muttering as he did so.
Not that unloading the gun would do much good. There were probably plenty more bullets in the drawer next to the old man’s bed. There had to be a stash of them somewhere because the whole room was full of bullet holes. Thousands of them. Holes in the walls, holes in the floor, even holes in the ceiling.
But besides the bullet holes, there wasn’t much else in the room. A slanted brass bed, a small nightstand, a warped wooden wardrobe, and a lady’s dressing table. The air reeked of human waste.
This couldn’t be the bedroom of the great Bandit King, could it?
I ran my finger along the dressing table’s dusty surface. The table was set with a silver mirror, a silver hairbrush, and a silver comb. An open jewelry box occupied one corner of the table, and a glass tray of fancy perfume bottles occupied the other. It seemed odd to find a lady’s dressing table in a place like this.
As for the old man wrapped up in the dirty blankets?
“You’re the Bandit King?” I asked.
The old newspaper articles had made him sound young and dashing and dangerous. Not like this. Not the stubble on his chin, or his gray lips and ashen face. The saliva glistening at the corner of his mouth.
Yikes.
The Bandit King had been watching me as closely as I had been watching him.
“You’re not Sheriff Watson!” he said, blinking at me. “Why, you’re just a boy. I might have killed you! I might have murdered a child!”
He wrapped his arms around his chest and rocked himself back and forth.
“You might have killed a man, too,” the Hitchhiker said, “if he had truly been Sheriff Watson.”
The Bandit King tilted his head. “What? Yes, I suppose you’re right. Wait. Sheriff Watson? He’s been dead for twenty years now. I thought you were a dead man! Don’t I think such silly things?”
He laughed until he coughed and
choked while the Hitchhiker and I exchanged looks. How could the Professor possibly think this mad old man could help us save the world?
“You must forgive me,” the Bandit King said. “Sometimes the past…such a long time ago…and with no one to talk to…I’m very alone, you see. So alone.”
His words slurred together into a soft song, which he sang to himself until it became a low moan. Then he leaned back against his pillow, his eyes sliding shut as if he’d fallen asleep.
“Um, excuse me.” I cleared my throat. “Bandit King sir?”
The Bandit King’s eyes opened. “You? Who are you? Sheriff Watson? Is that you? I swear I’ll…where’s my gun!”
He pawed at the sheets.
The Hitchhiker leaned over to whisper in my ear. “We don’t have much time, Rook.”
His eyes met mine, and they seemed even bluer than usual, as if they were filled with blue fire. Like maybe he could see things I couldn’t see, or like maybe he knew things I didn’t know.
“Um, Bandit King?” I turned back to the bed. “I’m not the sheriff. Remember we went over this already. Bandit King? Sir?”
“Try his real name,” the Hitchhiker said.
His real name? Why would that make a difference? Still, worth a try.
“John?” I touched the old man’s shoulder. “John Ketter? We need your help.”
“I have no help to give. Go away.”
“It’s about the Bronze Crown.”
He jerked as if something had hurt him. “What do you know about that? You can’t know anything. I buried that, years ago. Buried it, buried it!”
“I know, but uh….”
Explaining about the crown seemed impossible to do—even more impossible for him to understand.
“Look,” I said, “it’s complicated.”
“Everything is, with the Bronze Crown,” the old man said, and this time he was definitely John Ketter, not the Bandit King.
“Another man has found it,” I said. “He intends to use it to take over the world.”
“Of course he does. Who could resist?”
“You did. And that’s what I need to know. How did you beat the crown? What’s the crown’s weakness?”
“Does he love anyone? Or anything?”
How should I know who or what Artisans love, or even if they love? I looked over at the Hitchhiker for a clue, but his eyebrows were drawn together, and he stood that way for a while like he was thinking. In the end, he only shook his head.
“This man must love something,” John Ketter said. “Even if it’s gold or power or himself. Because that’s the curse of the crown. To lose what you love most. That is the price of claiming it.” His voice softened. “I lost something. Someone.”
“You lost Rose.”
“Yes.” He glanced around the room. “Do you like it? The house? It’s shabby now, but oh, you should have seen it when it was new. All the money I stole from the banks, I used it to build this house for her. I was going to marry her. We were going to be happy!”
He clenched at the blankets until his knuckles paled.
“That’s what I lost! Us. Our future. The children we were going to have. The years grown old and happy together. Her love. Her smiles. Even her wrinkles and tears. All gone!”
“What happened?” I asked, though I could guess the answer. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. But I had to know.
“She discovered I was the Bandit King! And she was horrified. She begged me to stop using the crown.”
He was breathing hard, wheezing. I looked at the Hitchhiker. Did we really have to do this? Wasn’t there some other way to learn the truth?
There wasn’t.
“I didn’t want to surrender it.” John Ketter bowed his head. “That kind of power, it’s intoxicating. The crown may enslave others, but it enslaves the wearer most. Rose gave me a choice. Either I pick the crown or her.”
His words became sobs—huge racking sobs that shook the brass bed and made its hinges creak.
“And heaven help me,” he said, “I chose the crown!”
He buried his face in the sheets, and the Hitchhiker touched my arm.
“Calm Ketter if you can,” he whispered. “It’s important.”
So I took the cleanest blanket off the bed and wrapped it around John Ketter’s shoulders. Then I patted him on the back.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” I said. “Try to breathe. We’ll talk about something else.”
Sort of stupid, really. Just what else was there to discuss, exactly? The crack in the wardrobe? The bullet holes? Or maybe what was on the dinner menu? My mind blanked completely. Fortunately, it didn’t matter in the end.
“No,” John Ketter said. “I want to confess. Especially if it might help you.”
He swallowed a few times and inhaled a deep breath.
“I tried to use the crown on Rose. I commanded her to accept me as the Bandit King. But she utterly refused. She loved me too much to accept what I was becoming. I tried commanding her again, harder. It hurt her terribly. Her face…so much pain. Still, she refused. So she died. When I saw what the crown had done—what I had done—casting the crown away was easy. But it was too late. Too late!”
He made a gasping sound, and his face turned even more ashen than before. He jolted up and grabbed my shirt.
“You must stop this man from using the crown. You must!”
Then he leaned back in a coughing fit.
“I have no idea what the Actor loves,” the Hitchhiker said, “or how we could use it to stop him. The Professor might be able to guess, but to stake so much on a guess….”
“Perhaps there is another way,” John Ketter said. The coughing fit had taken all his strength from him, and he lay there with his arms limp on the mattress. “To surrender the crown in freewill—that is the crown’s weakness. If you can convince this man to do that, it would break the power of the crown.”
I couldn’t see how that information would help much. The Actor would never give up the crown willingly. But the Hitchhiker seemed encouraged.
“Thank you,” he said.
A sheen of sweat was forming on John Ketter’s forehead, and his eyes were so hollow, his hair so thin. He lifted his head a little towards me.
“Tell me, boy. Do you think….”
His words faded, so I leaned over to hear him better, and he whispered in my ear.
“Do you think Rose might forgive me?”
But before I could find an answer, he started shaking his head, and the tears came back to his eyes.
“You’re right. You’re right!” He wailed. “She wouldn’t. How could she? How could she forgive her murderer?”
“Look,” I said, “she died because she loved you, right? And love, it forgives, doesn’t it?”
“So, Rose might forgive me someday?”
“Maybe she already has.”
He seemed to think about this until the corners of his mouth turned up. He let out a small sigh, but he didn’t draw in another breath right away. And when he did, it was smaller than the breath before. The next one was smaller still. He was so, so quiet.
“He’s dying!” I said. “We have to do something!”
But the Hitchhiker didn’t move.
One last whisper of a breath raised John Ketter’s chest ever so slightly. That was all. He didn’t breathe again. And his face seemed different. I recognized his features—his cheekbones, his jaw, his nose. Yet somehow his face wasn’t his anymore.
Was this what death looked like?
I turned to the Hitchhiker. “You knew he was going to die.”
“The Professor selected this very moment for us to visit him for that exact reason.”
Just when I was starting to think Artisans weren’t so bad after all.
“If you knew, then why didn’t you help him!”
“He was an old man, Rook. It was his time to die. As it will someday be mine. As it will someday be yours. No Artisan can change that.”
<
br /> “But why now? Why did the Professor send us to his deathbed?”
“This moment was the least likely to damage John Ketter’s timeline. Or anyone else’s, for that matter. The things we told him were forbidden foreknowledge. If we had visited him when he was younger or more able, he might have taken that foreknowledge and altered his choices, which would have done irreparable harm.”
I placed John Ketter’s arms across his chest and pulled the bed sheets farther up on his body. His eyes stared up at the ceiling. At least his face didn’t show any signs of pain.
“Do Artisans care?” I asked. “At all?”
The Hitchhiker frowned. “Of course, we care. Some more than others, and each in his or her own way, but yes, we care. It’s why the Actor has so many of us so concerned. An Artisan who has lost all compassion is dangerous to everyone.”
“You could go back,” I said. “Stop Ketter from using the crown against Rose. Or stop him from using it at all! You could fix this!”
“There are rules—complicated ones—about this sort of thing. Laws that mustn’t be broken.”
Rules? Laws? I wasn’t buying it.
“Maybe some laws should be broken!”
“You want me to change the past. But who am I to dictate what should and should not be!”
The Hitchhiker sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his thumb.
“People must be free to make their own choices in life,” he said. “Preventing them from making bad ones, forcing them to only make good ones, that’s not choice. That’s enslavement. Could I visit any moment in Ketter’s life and compel him to take a certain course of action? Of course. And don’t believe the temptation isn’t there.”
“So why not?” I said. “I mean, look at him!”
The Hitchhiker stared at John Ketter’s body for a moment. Then he moved away to the window and peered through the dirt-streaked panes of glass. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet.
“I know it’s hard to understand, Rook, but you must try. Forcing my will and my whims on people, altering their timelines and dictating their decisions, even if I thought it was for their own good, would be an utter violation of life and freedom. Were I to do so, it would diminish their very humanity.”
The Crown of the Bandit King Page 22