Time Travel Short Stories, page 69
If it worked, this could be it. The end. If it didn’t, she might as well start packing.
* * *
Gabriel stood in the doorway with his hands clenched into fists, shoulders squared as if he could turn himself into a wall. “Where are you going?”
“Go fry ice,” Marisol snapped. “Esto no tiene nada que ver contigo.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
Sissy trembled behind Marisol, holding the last box of her things. She had known this would happen.
“No me importa un pito who you’re talking to.” If Gabriel was a wall, Marisol was a jackhammer. “Move or I’m calling the cops.”
Gabriel took a step toward Sissy. “Mi amor, mi corazón, please don’t leave me. We’ll figure this out. We always do. Mi cielo, mi alma…” He held out his hand.
Sissy wanted to take it. She felt cold and small, standing in their apartment, walls eerily bare where there had been pictures of her and Gabriel smiling and kissing until Marisol threw them into garbage bags. Everything was already in the van outside except for this one box, heavy as life, which she was so tired of carrying.
“Move already,” Marisol said. “It’s over.”
Gabriel streaked toward Marisol with his fist half-cocked. Sissy knew that look, and recoiled even though he wasn’t gunning for her.
Marisol was faster, her arm whipping up like she was born ready. The pepper spray hit him square in the face, some of it misting into the air so even Sissy’s nose burned. Gabriel shrieked and clawed at his face as Marisol shook her head, lips curled in disgust.
“Hijo de puta,” she said. Then she turned her back on him like he wasn’t there and pushed Sissy out the door.
Her legs felt like they were made of brick. The sun had almost disappeared behind the endless rows of houses, but it still glinted off the wet sidewalks, and there was even a rainbow off to the west. She couldn’t bear it. Everything was too bright.
* * *
Ceci hid under her blanket, examining her new bruises with a flashlight. One, two, three, four, five. Her teachers said she was good at counting, and adding, and even subtracting. But she wasn’t always good at being quiet. She wasn’t good at not being seen.
Her mother cried on the floor of the bathroom, wailed like the stray cats that sometimes sat in the alley outside their apartment. “Oh god,” she sobbed. “Why does it have to be so hard?”
Shifting the flashlight to one hand, Ceci used the other to tuck the blanket under her toes. She didn’t know why it had to be so hard. Maybe if she did, she could make it better.
* * *
A tiny green light blinked at Cecilia as she lay on the table, from the computer on the end of the mechanical arm that swept up and down the length of her body. Her bones ached, but she knew it would be over soon.
“It has almost finished calibrations,” Dr. Prudhomme said.
“I know,” Cecilia replied. She had invented the machine, after all.
He frowned. “Of course. Forgive me my nerves. The complexity of the modified procedure –”
“It’s fine,” she said. She thought again of her first experiments: scrawling formulas on a white board. Adjusting. Recalibrating. Then, the breakthrough. And since then, the waiting, for the inevitable day that had finally arrived.
“I am ready now,” Dr. Prudhomme said.
“So am I,” she said, her voice cracking. The green light overhead stopped blinking and stayed steady, bright and clear.
* * *
It took Dr. Martinez a few minutes to write a note to her husband. She wanted to call him, to hear the sound of his voice, but it would only weaken her resolve. She might let him talk her out of it. Especially if this was it.
As she lay in the bed, the machine whirring into action, she found her thoughts straying. Not to the day when everything changed, the one that had set her on this path, but earlier.
A doctor’s office. A picture on the wall with faces that weren’t really there. Flying monkeys. And that bruise on her arm, the one a boy at school had given her – what was his name? God, she hadn’t thought of him in years.
The machine whirred, and whined, and dinged.
* * *
The lights were out again in the parking lot of Marisol’s apartment building, but Sissy was so excited it barely registered. She had gotten the job at the college. It wasn’t much – answering phones, forwarding emails, smiling – but it was steady money, and she could take classes for free at night. She had almost dropped out after losing her scholarship, and now she could stay. It would take a little longer, but someday, she would be Dr. Cecilia Alfonso.
Her mom had been ecstatic. Marisol had dragged her out to dinner to celebrate, and they’d laughed and drank and danced in their matching glittery red heels until they were sober enough to go home. Well, she was sober, anyway; Marisol was passed out in the passenger seat.
She unlocked the front door and threw it open, a voice in the back of her mind whispering that it hadn’t actually been locked, and then the light clicked on. Living room, couch, motley collection of saint candles in their tall glass containers. Just like they’d left it. She picked up a candle with a picture of San Lazaro, mostly empty, with a few stray matches inside. Why did she feel like a ghost had stuck its hand up her skirt?
Behind her, a thundercrack, so loud it turned her hearing into a dull dial tone. She turned and crouched at the same time, eyes huge. In the dim light spilling out her front door, she saw a shape step away from her car. Gabriel.
“This is all her fault,” he said. “You wouldn’t have left if it weren’t for her.” His voice sounded hollow, far away, even though he was so close she could have spit on him.
Slowly, shaking, Sissy stood and looked at her car. Marisol was slumped sideways, oh god, they had just been dancing, Marisol had gotten some guy’s number and she was asleep and now her head…
“Look at me,” he said, and she did. His eyes were red, like he’d been crying or drinking or both. Sweat beaded on his forehead, rolled down his nose like an errant tear.
She wanted to be angry, to turn her fingers into claws and cut his face into pieces. Instead she trembled, frozen, still clutching the candle. He took one step forward, then another, deeper into the long shadow she cast standing there in her doorway, and she couldn’t bring herself to back away. The gun in his hand seemed to suck up all the light as he leveled it at her chest.
“I’m sorry,” Gabriel said. Like he always did.
Sissy closed her eyes as the gun went off again and again.
* * *
Ceci’s mother watched her eat her cereal in silence, the bags under her eyes nearly the color of the five bruises on Ceci’s arm.
“You’ll have to wear a shirt with sleeves today,” she said quietly.
Ceci kept chewing her chocolate puffs.
“Baby, you know I didn’t mean to hurt you. You just make me so frustrated sometimes.”
She knew. She knew it like she knew her favorite cereal tore up the roof of her mouth. She loved it anyway.
Ceci put her spoon down and got off her chair. She walked over to her mother and crawled into her lap, and let herself be held for a little while. In her bowl, her cereal softened and turned her milk to chocolate.
* * *
Cecilia gasped, eyes flying open as the pain hit. She had expected it, but she had thought death would be quick. Instead, she felt her heart stagger, struggle to keep pumping blood even though it was broken.
“Be at peace, Doctor,” Dr. Prudhomme said gently, tapping something on his console. “It has been my honor to know you.”
Drugs flooded her veins, burning cold. With a smile and a sigh, she laid a hand over the wounds in her chest.
* * *
Dr. Martinez looked down and smiled. “Suck it, Hunt. That funding is mine.”
There on her arm, the size of a small boy’s fist, was a perfect purple bruise.
* * *
Click. Click. Sissy opened her eyes.
Gabriel stared at his gun, turning it one way, then the other. “Que rayo –”
The confusion on his face broke something in her. She swung the San Lazaro candle at his face, where it shattered, shards of glass driving through his eyelids, his lips, his cheeks. He screamed, dropping the gun and clutching at his eyes. Blood fell in fat drops to the ground as he cursed at her, his words muddled.
It occurred to her that she should be dead, but the thought buzzed around her like a mosquito settling on a place to bite. Sirens wailed, drawing closer until they drowned out the sound of Gabriel’s cries. One neighbor finally appeared, an old lady who took one look at the bullet casings on the asphalt before crossing herself and praying a fervent Hail Mary.
Sissy sat down at some point, on her doorstep, because her feet hurt. Someone stood in front of her and asked her a question in English, which she suddenly couldn’t understand. The question was repeated in Spanish, and her eyes focused on a cop, huge and dark.
“Do you need medical attention?” he asked again. “Are you hurt?”
Sissy shook her head, then nodded, then burst into tears.
“Martinez, get over here,” he said. One of the paramedics jogged over, kneeling next to her.
“Hey there, miracle,” the man said softly. “Can you walk?”
She decided that she probably could. He offered her a hand but she waved it off and stood, hobbled to the ambulance by herself, kicking off her shiny red shoes as she went.
This Door is Locked
Adam Vine
The cliffs stabbed like a crusted knife from dark sea to pale night. David pulled his step at the last second before he ran off the edge, barely avoiding a fall that would have smashed him to pieces on the jagged rocks lurking a thousand feet below. He stumbled backward and vomited on the snow.
Few things were more unpredictable, or harder on the stomach than traveling through the Doors. An air car dropping too fast off a high platform, maybe, or launching into space on the equatorial fast track for the first time.
The Escher Door had dropped him on top of a devil’s tower, a five hundred foot-tall needle of black stone rising over a gnashing, alien sea. Beyond the salt water channel, at least ten miles away, a mainland of pale fjords marched away in every direction. There was nothing on top of David’s tall, miserable little island but a single tree anchored bitterly beneath the permafrost.
Fragmented images rose through the murky penumbra of his memory: Rose’s smile, an old man in a tower, a ship half-buried in snow.
I gotta keep moving, David told himself. If I don’t move I’m gonna die. The Last Door is out there. All I need to do is find it, and I’ll be a fixture in the history books until the end of days. I’ll finally be able make some real money, buy Rose that cottage on the bluffs of Bolinas. I must be getting close. Maybe this time I’ll actually find it.
Maybe this time.
Instinct drove his hands into his pockets, where he found his supplies were almost gone. He had a few vacuum-sealed bags of Earl Grey, enough water to last another day or two, three protein bars, and a picture of Rose smiling under an umbrella on a rainy Budapest riverside. Their second date, David remembered, back before they were both starving professors trying to eke out a living in the oversaturated, over-priced wasteland of New York.
An old, hollow pain in his heart made David think about taking a running leap off the cliff’s edge, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to splatter himself on those distant, glaive-like rocks, to feed whatever creatures lurked beneath the waves of this planet’s briny, black ocean, wherever this planet was. But he knew it was just the pain of seeing her face again.
This world, the world of the fjords, is the best candidate we have for being their home world. If I’m going to do it, it’s not going to be until after I find them.
There was no other way down from the devil’s tower that David could see. Returning through the Door was never an option, either. Escher Doors were one-way.
Where the hell is my ship? He could remember landing it, but not where, which meant the memory wasn’t very old or very recent, but somewhere in the middle.
The Escher Doors robbed you of your short-term memories. That was the price you paid to wander through them. But David had been wandering long enough that the oldest memories of his pilgrimage had started becoming fixed. It was only a matter of time until-
The wind howled, cold biting through David’s jacket, making his knees buckle and collapse. He fell onto his knees and vomited again on the snow, the empty contents of his stomach an embarrassingly small offering to the gods of this stark, frozen world.
Gotta find shelter. Fast. Too weak to try climbing. Body temperature dropping. I need something to eat. I’m so hungry.
The thought of food was enough to motivate him to move. He found his feet, brushed the snow and loitering bits of vomit off his beard and clothes, and began frantically searching for something, anything, that would point the way to the next Door.
But there was nothing. Soon the gray, glass bottle bottom sun sank behind the fjords, and David was forced to make camp, digging a tiny shelter in the snowbank under the foot of the island’s single tree that he hoped – no, prayed – would keep him alive until morning.
A green light caught his eye while he was digging, far off across the fjords and the bruised, purple sea, as the dusk finally deepened.
It was only a tiny, green glimmer, so miniscule that if David didn’t know what it was, he might have mistaken it for some bioluminescent animal prowling the shoreline. He watched the soft, jade light flickering on and off, as regular as a heartbeat, until he was done digging, then as he laid shivering in his shelter, waiting for sleep to take him. He watched it when he woke up at night to urinate, and again when the wind howled like a blizzard of throwing knives over the mouth of his shelter.
David knew the light’s source could only be one thing. It was one of the ten million-year lamps that guarded each Escher Door, the beacons set to guide the Wanderers on their long, endless pilgrimage.
He awoke to the grey light of dawn seeping over the fjords, and a soft, mechanical buzzing in his ear. David leapt up out of his snowy bed, and immediately kicked himself for being so easily startled. Each Escher Door was fitted with a resupply station to replenish those who traveled through it.
Rose would be laughing at me right now.
The pain of losing her was always the worst after waking up. Her voice echoed in his mind’s ear: I don’t want you to go. What if something bad happens to you?
He saw her wiping her eyes on the back of her wrists, took them, and kissed her on the eyelids.
Nothing bad is going to happen to me, babe.
What had the old man had said about redemption being the inversion of selfishness? David couldn’t remember.
The whirring sound grew louder with each handful of snow. His fingers scraped metal less than a foot down, and the bare corner of the small, spherical delivery plate of a food printer peered up at him.
The machine had sensed him exit the Escher Door and cycled on sometime during the night. David couldn’t blame a machine that was several million years old for taking a few hours to turn on. He only hoped that whatever it printed was still edible.
Thankfully, it was. The raw, dirty paste that fed from the printer’s nozzle into an insta-fabbed leaf cup tasted disgusting, but it gave him enough strength to get up and move around.
He washed his face and hands with the snow, placed the leaf he’d eaten out of in the printer’s recycling bay, and started looking for the path that would lead him to the next Door, which he now knew for certain was hidden on top of the devil’s tower.
Within minutes, David found the hatch.
It was an old fashioned trapdoor built into the ground and hidden under several feet of snow, not five paces away from the nutrient station. The hatch hissed open as he muscled through the ages of rust and time that had sealed it.
David crouched and lowered himself into the dark dampness of the ancient stone stairwell. It was several degrees warmer here than up top, and grew even warmer as he descended. Automated lanterns in the ceiling and walls flickered on as he passed. The lanterns had been one of the first subjects of David’s study when he began specializing in Wanderer culture back at the university in New York.
Feels like that life belonged to a different person, David reflected, as those old memories came back to him: of cramming to finish lesson plans, and braving hordes of students at office hours; of pinching every penny so he and Rose could make rent each month on that stupid, microscopic studio apartment that always stank of burning roaches; of practicing with the band, of missing practice; of the rare one or two days a year when they got a gig, and he could let it all go; of his fingers dancing up the worn neck of his Engelhart stand up double bass, the only item of any value he and Rose owned; of Rose’s eyes glimmering, inches from the stage, as if they existed only for him.
At last, the stairwell opened to a wide tunnel hewn into the glistening rock of the channel floor. Huge dripstones hung from the ceiling like a theater of forgotten puppets, overgrowing the ancient pictograms the Wanderers had cut into the walls.
Those mood pictures were the only form of writing the Wanderers had left behind. David had once published a theory that the indecipherable, swirling doodles had held religious significance, that they didn’t tell a story, but were more akin to visual hymns.
They are formless. Pure. Like jazz, they wander without knowing the road, only the destination.
But like all David’s theories, that one would likely go unfulfilled unless David found what he was looking for. The Wanderers appeared to have destroyed all written records of their history once the Escher Doors were built, including any discernable map to where the Doors led, which was why David’s mentor Dr. Liapis had informally given the long-since-vanished alien species their moniker. No physical remains of the Wanderers’ bodies had ever been found.
