A Captive in Time

by Sarah Dreher

  He’d made a couple of mistakes back in Kansas. Used the knife before he was sure. No one was more surprised than he when the Thing didn’t transform. Honest mistakes. But they’d called him a murderer, called him crazy, even. Imagine that. He’d talked himself into forgiving them, because they hadn’t read The Word and didn’t know any better.

  They’d been all ready to hang him. But he’d gotten away. Burned down the jail with a match they’d been too excited to find, tucked away in the toe of his boot, and even had time to grab his Jesus-knife before he faded off into the night.

  Oh, yes, it would be sweet to do it now. But the Word was very specific on the Rituals.

  Better to wait until the time was right.

  The Sanctified Man pouted a little. He didn’t like waiting. It made his forehead ache.

  Something spoke in his heart. “Welcome the Pain. Let it be a constant reminder that Thou art My Servant.”

  Humbled, he turned to the street. He’d found a good life here in Tabor. A wife. A position in the community. God had rewarded him well. Better to do as Jesus said. He couldn’t risk a repeat of Kansas.

  Last week he’d been tempted to take the Witch. But he’d waited, and now the Witch had delivered the Stranger into his hands.

  He thanked Jesus for teaching him the lesson of patience.

  The Sanctified Man slipped the knife back into his pocket, pasted a smile across his face and stepped forward into the sunlight.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The sky was clear. A few wisps of cloud brushed across the perfect blue, feathers strung out behind like mares’ tails. There one second, the next swept away by the upper air winds.

  “We should report him,” Stoner said.

  “Who?”

  “Hayes.” She touched the flaming welt on Billy’s cheek. “What he did to you is child abuse.”

  Billy frowned and pulled away. “I ain’t no child.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Legally, you’re a child.”

  The boy snorted. “Who you gonna report him to?”

  “The police. Or sheriff. Whatever passes for the law in Tabor.”

  “Nothin’ passes for the law in Tabor.”

  She looked at him. “You don’t even have a police department?”

  “Nope.” He glanced over. “Look, this ain’t one of your back East fancy towns, with everything divided up into neat parcels and people with titles and occupations and all. This here’s Tabor. Tabor. And Tabor and civilization ain’t the same thing.”

  “Yes,” Stoner muttered. “I’d noticed.”

  They rode on in silence. “Anyway,” Billy said after a while, “what if we did have all them law folks just dying to protect innocent widows and children? Whata you think they’d do to him? Haul him off to jail?”

  “Probably not,” Stoner said, remembering the reality of how things worked in the world. “But he’d be arrested. It might make him think twice.”

  Billy gave a short laugh, like a pistol shot. “Ain’t nobody about to think twice about what they do to me.”

  “You know, Billy, you have a terrible self-concept.”

  He swallowed hard and slapped the reins against the mule’s rump. “Well, don’t worry. Probably ain’t contagious.”

  She sensed it would be foolish, and probably provocative, to try to press the issue. He was surly enough as it was.

  Still, there was something about the boy that she liked. Liked very much, in fact. Something that told her he was a scared kid underneath, putting on a big act because life had knocked him around.

  Stoner laughed to herself. Life. Two days in beautiful, psychotic Tabor was enough to make you feel thoroughly knocked around by life.

  “If you could be anything you wanted,” she asked, “what would that be?”

  He started to speak, then stopped himself. “Nope,” he said roughly. “I ain’t gonna tell.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’d just laugh at me.”

  “I wouldn’t. I swear it.”

  He shot a look at her from beneath his hat. “Yeah, you would.”

  “Billy, you’re armed and driving the wagon. If I laughed at you, you could put me out right here and let the wolves get me.”

  “You’d want to, though,” he said petulantly.

  “Dreams aren’t funny,” Stoner said firmly. “I never laugh at dreams. It’s bad for your Karma.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched in a smile. “You sound like Blue Mary. She talks about funny stuff like that.”

  “We’re both strange. Are you going to tell me?”

  “I’m thinking on it.” He chewed his lower lip for a second. He cleared his throat. “I want to be a school teacher,” he burst out, his voice cracking under the strain.

  “I thought you didn’t like school.”

  “I lied about that,” he said. “Your friend, the teacher, what’s she teach?”

  “History.”

  “No kidding? That’s what I’d like to teach.” His eyes actually glistened with excitement. “It must be great.”

  Stoner smiled. “It has its good points, and bad points, like anything else. You could do it.”

  Billy hooted. “Lady, I can’t even read and write.”

  She was beginning to feel a little annoyed with his self-deprecation. “So learn to read and write, and then go to school, and teach history.”

  “Yeah,” Billy said. “The entire town of Tabor’s lined up just bustin’ to teach me.”

  “Get out of Tabor. Nothing’s keeping you there.”

  “Where’d I go?”

  “Denver. Topeka. Anywhere.” Oh, God, she thought suddenly, don’t let him tell me he’ll disappear into air if he leaves. Don’t let me find out this is the Twilight Zone.

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He was silent. The wagon wheel creaked and cracked with the sound of old wood and leather. The mule stumbled along, hooves pounding the earth like a drum, grunting and sending up little puffs of mist from its nostrils into the still air.

  “I’m wanted,” he said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. “Tell you the truth, first time I saw you I thought maybe you was after me, way you just showed up there. That was before I realized you was a girl.”

  She decided to let the obvious sexism pass. Adolescents were notoriously immune to consciousness-raising. “Wanted?” she asked.

  Billy nodded. “Killed a man. ”

  “Really? So did I !”

  “Cold blood?”

  “Self defense.”

  “Yeah, me too. Only it was my Ma that was in danger.”

  “It was my—friend.”

  “Ain’t you afraid they’ll string you up?”

  Stoner laughed. “Of course not. They didn’t even charge me. There was a coroner’s inquest, and I told my story, and that was that.”

  “Yeah?” He glanced at her skeptically. “Where’d all this happen?”

  “Wyoming.”

  “Well, that figures. You can do anything in Wyoming. That’s rough territory.”

  “It was rough for Bryan Oxnard, all right. The man you killed, was he your father?”

  “Guess so. Ma said so, he said no. Nobody else’s ridin’ out to claim me, so it must be true.”

  “What did he do to your mother?”

  Billy started to take off his hat, seemed to think better of it, and mashed it down harder on his head. His ears stuck out beneath little wisps of hair. Stoner thought it was adorable.

  “He was drunk,” Billy said. “Wasn’t the first time. He’d get liquored up and turn mean. For a while he’d just hit out at anything that crossed his path. Lately he’d come lookin’ for us.”

  “Did he beat you?”

  “Couple of times. Mostly he went for my Ma.”

  Stoner decided it would be futile to ask why the authorities hadn’t been informed.

  “I couldn’t let him do that any more, see, on acc
ount of she ain’t well. I mean, it always made me feel bad, but I was just so scared of him... Anyway, one night he came for her, and I guess something in me finally got up the nerve to go for him back.”

  “Good,” Stoner said. “What did you do?”

  “Picked up a jug and busted his head open.” He smiled a little. “His own damn liquor jug. Busted it right over his damn head. ’Scuse my language. Booze and blood and stuff all over the place. Smelled like Big Dot’s on Saturday night.”

  “And you took off?”

  “You bet I did. Jeez.”

  “Are you sure he was dead?”

  “Sure looked dead.”

  They had reached the crest of the hill.

  “There she is,” said Billy. He pulled the mule to a stop in front of the Tabor sign and stood up. Wind tugged at his hat. He held it on with one hand and pointed to the horizon with the other. “I don’t see no machine, d’you?”

  Stoner shook her head. She was disappointed, but somehow not surprised. Somehow, the closer they came to the point where she had last seen the car, the more she doubted she’d find it.

  “Wanta go down the hill and get a closer look?” the boy asked, a touch of sympathy softening his usual brusqueness.

  “Might as well.”

  The wagon lurched and rattled down the slope of matted prairie grass. Stoner felt each bump like a blow to her spine. Her shoulders ached as she was tossed from side to side. She was going to be a mass of bruises and lacerations before this was over. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered but getting out of here.

  The front wheel hit a rock and sent her flying across the seat into Billy. He threw an arm in front of her to steady her. “Thanks,” she said, and grasped his hand. “I don’t know how you can ride in this thing.”

  “Ain’t hard,” the boy said. “You get used to it.”

  She was silent for a moment. This boy was too young for this, to spend the rest of his life—a long time—living out a fantasy. After all, it was one thing for a bunch of adults to decide to live in Disneyland, but Billy was only a kid. There was still time for him, time to get his problems straightened out and go to school. Time to be what he wanted to be. It wasn’t fair.

  “Whose idea was it,” she asked, “for you to live here?”

  He glanced at her. “In Tabor?”

  Stoner nodded.

  “Mine.”

  “Why?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why here?” She gestured, taking in the barren countryside. “Couldn’t you have found a better place?”

  “Suits me,” he said gruffly.

  “But don’t you ever want to… be like other kids? You know, hang out in malls, ride around in cars, pick up girls, whatever kids do?”

  “Nope.”

  She found it hard to believe. “Why not?”

  “Cause I never been in a car, except for a box car once between St. Louis and Kansas City and it weren’t much for ridin’ in. Never heard of nothin’ called ‘malls’, don’t much like girls—not young silly ones, anyway—and I ain’t like other kids.”

  “Of course you are. I mean, you might not have had all the opportunities other kids have, and there are a few things you might want to clear up, but...”

  “I ain’t gonna talk about this,” he snapped.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to step on your toes.”

  He kept his eyes glued to the horizon, his jaw set in a rigid pose.

  “Really,” Stoner said. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

  “Yeah? Them people back there in Tabor, they don’t mean no harm, neither. But they manage to do it, don’t they?”

  “Yes, they do.”

  The wagon curved around the side of a slight hill. In the distance lay what looked like a pile of coal. A burned-out farm. “Why don’t they like you, Billy? Why are they so quick to blame you for everything?”

  “You heard what Hayes said. I got no family.”

  “But that’s not a crime. Lots of people don’t have families.”

  He snorted. “I never met none.”

  “Big Dot doesn’t have a family, does she? And Lolly and Cherry?”

  “Guess not,” he groused.

  “But you all look like a family to me.”

  The boy glanced at her. “A family?”

  “Sure. You love each other, don’t you?”

  Billy blushed from his fingertips to his hairline. “Them women, they’s whores.”

  “And what difference does that make? You do love them, don’t you? Like family.”

  “So what if I do?” he said loudly. “Nothin’ wrong with that, is there?”

  “Nothing at all,” Stoner said.

  “Jes’ ’cause them old clucks back there got everything all figured out, that don’t make it so, does it?”

  Ah, yes, the old Biddies. Keepers of the sacred flame of Civilization. Defenders of Respectability. Mistresses of Morality. “Certainly not.”

  Billy gave a self-satisfied nod. “That’s what I figured.”

  They had reached the bottom of the hill, where the car should have been, where Interstate 70 should have been. And, of course, there was no car, and no Interstate. Only a dusty wagon track coming from nowhere and leading nowhere. Stoner pointed to it. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Wagon trail. Topeka to Denver.”

  “Wagon trail.”

  “You know. For folks going west.”

  She sat for a while, helplessly, looking at the track. She got out of the wagon and walked around with her hands in her pockets.

  Now what?

  It was possible, of course, that Billy had taken her someplace totally unrelated to where she was trying to go. Possible that her car, and escape, lay just over a different hill. Possible that, just beyond the range of her hearing and sight, perfectly normal people were busily going about their perfectly normal business in their perfectly normal ways.

  But why would the boy do that?

  Let’s think about what this could all mean:

  1) I have unknowingly fallen into a nest of drug dealers and smugglers, who, under the cover of being an innocent ghost town (out of season), and sponsored by the National Security Council, are covertly supplying guns to the Nicaraguan Contras. In which case I will never get out of here alive.

  2) Tabor is a town made up entirely of persons experiencing a mass psychosis, a folie á multitude, who believe they are actually doing what they’re doing. But they wouldn’t care whether I left or not, would they? They wouldn’t be shifting the scenery to try to keep me here.

  3) Like something out of a Shirley Jackson novel, the town is a vampire, the large-scale equivalent of Hill House. And I’m the latest victim, to be sacrificed to feed its endless hunger.

  4) The residents of Tabor make up a religious sect whose most cherished belief is that everything that has happened since 1871 is a sin and an abomination—which may be right—and who have forsaken evil worldly ways. Kind of like the Amish. But even the Amish stop short of publishing 19th Century newspapers. Nevertheless...These good souls also don’t believe in sex, and the only way to add to their numbers is to kidnap helpless travelers on the Interstate and force them to remain forever in Tabor.

  But then there’s Blue Mary, who is an intimate friend and relative of Aunt Hermione—even though Aunt Hermione has never mentioned her—, who would certainly have known about this place and warned me away from it.

  Which left her with

  5) Blue Mary is right.

  She couldn’t decide if that was the most comforting, or most disturbing explanation of all. Disturbing? That she had taken a detour in time and ended up in a backwater? Why would that be disturbing?

  Because she might not get back?

  Or because the mere fact of it turned everything she took for granted upside down?

  But that had already happened to her, many times. Look at Shady Acres. Look at Siyamtiwa. Look at Gwen, for heaven’s sake. Gwen, who was the one person in the entire
world she most wanted to love her. The last person in the world she ever expected to love her. Gwen, who loved her.

  As long as we’re talking about miracles, there’s a real miracle. To be loved by the woman you love is the greatest miracle of all.

  A wave of homesickness hit her and made her feel as if all her insides were being pulled into the ground.

  She looked around, hoping for distraction. The wagon was empty. The mule pressed its nose into the dust, trying to make a meal of dead grass and stubble. A hill away Billy stood, hat in hand, making conversation with a small group of Native American women.

  Stoner hesitated to approach them. They seemed to be laughing, having a good time. She shouldn’t interrupt. On the other hand...

  The women looked up curiously as she approached.

  “Hi,” she said.

  One of the women stepped forward, crossed her arms across her chest, pulled a down-turned mouth, and said, “Hi.”

  Stoner had to laugh.“Do I look that bad?”

  “Bad.”

  Billy clamped his hat on his head and pulled it low. “I was askin’ them about your wagon.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Nope.” He turned back to the women, said a few words in a language she didn’t understand.

  The women nodded solemnly, and began drifting away.

  “Maybe I should explain to them...” Stoner began.

  “You speak Arapahoe?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “Forget it. They wouldn’t understand you.”

  “That woman did.”

  “She didn’t understand you,” Billy said gently. “She mocked you.”

  “Oh.” She felt very foolish, and very alone.

  Billy glanced at her, then at the sky. “I wish you’d trust me,” he said in a low voice.

  “I do trust you. It’s just that I find myself in a very peculiar situation.”

  “Yeah, it’s peculiar, all right. Big Dot filled me in, kinda.” He laughed. “ ’Course, she thinks you’re stone cold nuts. But probably not dangerous.”

  “I must remember to thank her for the compliment,” Stoner said wryly.

  “You gotta admit, it looks suspicious.”

  “Suspicious !!” Her anger flared out of control. “I’ll tell you what looks suspicious. A town full of people in costumes acting like 1871, that’s what looks suspicious.” She kicked at the ground. “And do you want to know the worst of it? When I get out of here, I’ll never be able to explain it to anyone, because it’s so crazy no one would ever believe me.” She felt her voice rise to shrillness, out of control. She didn’t care. “But it’s irrelevant, isn’t it? Because you people are never going to let me out of this fruitcake place.”