Shimmer

by Matthew Keith

  Chapter 5

  “Wake up, Alex.”

  It was early Sunday morning, still dark outside. Hope swelled in Alex’s heart.

  “Dad?” he croaked, still partially asleep.

  Alex opened his tired eyes and, with a start, flinched back against his pillow. Silas was bent over the bed, mere inches from his face. In the darkness of the room, Silas’s pale whiteness was a terrifying vision.

  “What time is it?” Alex asked uncertainly, spooked at the way he’d been woken.

  “Time for us to go to work,” Silas answered, straightening. “Get up and get dressed. You’re coming to EMIT.”

  This was new. Silas had been so non-committal with regard to his stewardship of Alex that it could hardly be called that at all. Yes, Alex had gone with him to EMIT twice already, but Silas had presented those invitations as requests. This sounded like a demand. Alex’s instinctive reaction was to tell Silas to go away and leave him be, but there was an unspoken urgency in the pale man’s demeanor. Alex didn’t want to pass up a chance to be part of something that might lead to finding his dad.

  When they arrived at EMIT, the facility was empty. The ever-present hum and buzz of the lab’s machinery, a sound so familiar to Alex that he normally didn’t even notice it, now seemed to roar in the absence of people.

  Silas led him straight to his father’s office and shut the door, locking it behind them.

  Alex blanched. There was no one else in the whole building. Why lock the door? “What’s this all about?” he asked uneasily.

  “There is something you need to see,” Silas told him. “Something I am hoping you will be able to help clarify.”

  Alex rubbed his arms uncomfortably and nodded, irrationally feeling as if he was in trouble.

  “Remember when I asked if your father ever spoke to you about teleportation technology?” Silas asked.

  “Yes,” Alex answered dubiously.

  Silas held up a small disk. “You will watch this video.”

  Alex squinted at it. It was unlabeled. “What’s on it?”

  “It will be easier if you simply watch it,” Silas replied, placing the disk in his father’s computer. “You may ask questions afterward. In fact, I hope that you will.” He gestured to the desk chair, inviting Alex to sit.

  Alex sat down cautiously, anxious to know if Silas had found something important but nervous nonetheless. Silas was acting strangely, and that was saying something considering that Silas was already one of the strangest people Alex knew.

  “On the day your father disappeared,” Silas told him, “he asked me to meet him at the company’s airstrip test site. When I arrived, he wasn’t there. But there was a video camera mounted on a tripod.”

  Alex glanced at the blank computer screen and then back at Silas again.

  Silas nodded and pressed ‘PLAY’. An image of a deserted stretch of pavement appeared on the monitor. Alex recognized it as one of the properties owned by EMIT, an abandoned airstrip just outside of town used for testing.

  The same property where his mom’s car had been found the day she disappeared.

  “You’re just showing me this now?” Alex demanded. “And you’ve had it since the day he disappeared?” He stood, indignant.

  “I had hoped your father would be back by now.”

  “Back by now? You know where he is?”

  “No,” Silas spoke the single word softly, without conviction, and Alex narrowed his eyes. “Please,” Silas continued, “watch the video. Perhaps you will understand why I am having such trouble answering.”

  Frustrated, Alex flounced back in his chair and concentrated on the screen.

  In the video, it was a bright, cloudless day. His father’s face loomed into view, looking sideways into the camera close up, and then backing away until he was in clear view. He stood there, excitement plainly evident on his face. He looked as if he could barely contain a grin.

  “My name is Charles Croatoan,” he said breathlessly.

  “What is he wearing?” Alex asked, leaning toward the screen. In the video, his father wore a black body suit that looked as if it had wires running through it, thousands of them crisscrossing the fabric, covering his entire body.

  Silas spread his hands, palms up. “I do not know.”

  “What I am about to demonstrate,” Alex’s father continued, “is a scientific breakthrough the likes of which have never been seen.” He was sweating heavily in the hot sun and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. “I have exhaustively tested this new device on objects, both large and small. I have also tested it on animals of varying shapes and sizes. All tests have resulted in indisputable success.”

  Alex looked at Silas in alarm, but the pale-faced man just pointed back at the monitor.

  “This will be the first human test,” Alex’s father spoke directly into the camera now, his tone turning calm and professional. “No one else is here, no one else knows what I intend to do. In fact, no one else is aware that this device exists.” He stepped to the side, allowing the camera a full view of the airstrip.

  “What device?” Alex asked in confusion. “I don’t see any device!”

  Again, Silas pointed to the video. “You will.”

  Alex’s father raised his right arm and pointed away from the camera. With a quick motion of his hand, a red laser shone forth. To Alex it looked like a simple laser pointer, the kind you could pick up at any department store, but it beamed from the wrist of the suit. Alex’s dad pointed the laser down the airstrip, far off into the distance. “Please observe,” his father said to the camera. “The sun has created a shimmer, a mirage, on the pavement. I am pointing the laser at that shimmer now.”

  Alex leaned forward, his nose nearly touching the screen. He could see it—the shimmer—it was on the concrete of the airstrip, a far-off reflection from the heat of the sun. His father was pointing the laser directly into the center of it.

  “If successful,” Alex’s father continued, “this device—this suit—will teleport me from where I stand now to the shimmer I have indicated.”

  “What?” Alex said disbelievingly to the monitor. He looked up at Silas. “What?” he asked louder. “Why would he do this? Why would he do it alone? He was supposed to be working on an energy solution, not this!”

  On the video, his father continued relentlessly. “Please watch carefully,” he said.

  Steadying his arm and taking careful aim, Alex’s father stretched out every finger on his hand. He looked back at the camera one last time, smiled, and then turned to face his destination. With a sharp jerk, he clenched his hand into a fist.

  There was a dull flash of light that surrounded Alex’s father, almost gray in color, and when it was gone, so was he. Further down the airstrip, simultaneously, there was another dull flash of light exactly where the laser had been pointed.

  Less than a second later, both flashes were gone, and so was Alex’s dad.

  “Dad!” Alex hadn’t realized he’d stood from his chair. He looked wildly at Silas. “Why didn’t you tell me about this? He’s dead?!”

  “I don’t think so,” Silas replied in his monotone.

  “You don’t think so?” Alex demanded angrily, pointing back at the monitor. “He made a video of it! He blew himself up! How can you think he isn’t? Do the police know about this?”

  “Please sit down, Alex,” Silas told him in his infuriatingly calm tone.

  “I will not! I want to know—right now—why haven’t you reported this?”

  “Sit. Down,” Silas demanded.

  Alex ground his teeth, trying to stare Silas down, but ultimately the pale-faced man’s impassive gaze won out. Temporarily cowed into submission, Alex sat, but murder was written all over his face.

  Silas approached, looming eerily over him. He leaned past Alex’s shoulder and cued the video back to the time just before his father had clenched his fist and disappeared.

  “Watch,” Silas told him.

  The video was now playi
ng in super-slow motion, the volume turned off. In the video, his father turned away from the camera, his movements almost jerky as the footage crept forward frame by frame. Silas kept his hand hovering over the computer’s mouse.

  Slowly, agonizingly, Alex watched as his father clenched his hand, his fingers curling inward a beat at a time. This time, instead of the dull flash occurring in the space a mere second, Alex saw what really happened. The wires in the suit lit up as soon as his father clenched his fist. They glowed so bright that it consumed his entire body and obscured him from sight. At their zenith, they winked out. In the same moment, they reappeared in the distance on the airstrip.

  “The suit?” Alex asked. “The suit is the device?”

  Silas hit the pause button quickly, not answering Alex’s question.

  “Look,” he said, pointing at the screen at the distant spot on the airstrip. “Look at the shimmer. Do you see?”

  Alex leaned forward, squinting. “I see a flash of light,” he said.

  “Look closer,” Silas urged. With the pointer of the mouse, he traced a dark outline in the flash.

  Alex squinted. “That’s a person,” he said, his pulse quickening. “That’s my dad!”

  “I believe it is,” Silas replied in his quiet voice.

  So his dad had done it. He’d teleported himself. But that didn’t change the outcome. He was still gone. He’d managed to send himself forward in space, but at the price of his life.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Alex asked, his voice cracking. “Why would you keep this from me? What do we do now?”

  Was his father really gone? Alex couldn’t imagine a life without him.

  “You misunderstand,” Silas told him. “Watch. Watch the outline within the flash.”

  Silas clicked the video forward one frame at a time, playing it until the flash vanished. He looked at Alex with raised eyebrows. “Did you see it?”

  Alex shook his head, confused.

  “Watch again,” Silas told him.

  Silas backed it up and played it frame by frame once more, then backed it up and did it again. When Alex still didn’t react, he did it one last time. That time, Alex saw. He moved in close to the monitor again.

  “One more time,” Alex asked. “Please.”

  With his finger on the screen, he traced the image of his father in the light. A frame went past, and the outline of his father was much lower than where his finger was. Another frame went past, and all Alex could see of his father was an outline of his head, just above the pavement. After one more frame, his father was gone completely.

  Alex stared at the screen, trying to make sense of it. “He sunk?” Alex finally asked. “Into the pavement?” He looked at Silas. “Is that what I just saw? How is that possible?”

  Silas looked back with clear eyes. “Right now,” he answered, “I believe the only one who could answer that is your father. But since he isn’t here, I need you to try to.”

  “Me?” Alex asked incredulously. He didn’t know the first thing about electro-magnetics.

  “You worked with him,” Silas said. “You spent time with him. I don’t think he died, I think he went somewhere else. I want to help you find him and bring him back. We need to continue his research. You need to continue his research.”