Time Travel Omnibus, page 1063
“Sounds . . . maybe a little boring?” said Laci.
“Sometimes it was,” said Mears. “Sometimes it was indeed. But we were young and in love, and Sally and I weren’t really all that sociable a couple, anyway. It’s why we were vagabonding around in the first place. I got my fill of people during the war in Italy—don’t like being too close to anyone, you know? Foxholes and such . . .”
His voice trailed off, and he closed his eyes momentarily, lost in memory. But he soon reopened them and looked again at the picture on the view screen, the twins standing there in the gloom, their hair whipped by the wind and rain.
“And Sally came from a big Eye-talian family up in Portland, and they had about a thousand kids, you know? She loved the idea of having her own bathroom, having her own clothes without having three older sisters wearing ’em first. It was a stroke of luck, this job was.”
“And you had kids?” Laci prompted.
“And we had two sons,” he said quietly, nodding as he looked at the camera. “We didn’t know we was having twins when she caught pregnant, nor during the pregnancy itself. Sally was huge, all right, but what did we know? Tom Foster came out from town every month or so, make sure Sally was eating enough, check her blood and such, but they didn’t have them ultrasounds or anything back then, and Doc Foster was a bit of a drunk anyway, so we never knew. Not ‘til they came, anyway . . .”
“The twins,” said Laci. “The boys on the balcony.”
“We never let ’em up there,” said Mears. “Too dangerous. The house is only about fifty feet tall, but the winds you get up there will whip you right off, you’re not careful. And Jed and Jerry weren’t all that coordinated sometimes.”
“Those are their names?” she asked softly. She was enrapt in the tale, and her questions were all lubricant for the story, meant to oil it along. It was working, too.
“Jedidiah and Jeremiah,” he said. “Lucky they have names at all, you know. I ended up delivering ’em myself—they came a few weeks early, and we couldn’t get to town for the birth. I had an old Packard, and it wouldn’t run half the time without you took apart the whole engine and put it back together, and when the twins came it was dead on the drive, so there we were. There was a storm going, just like there is right now, and they hadn’t electrified all the way out to Frenchman’s head, so we were in the dark, there in the Keeper’s house.” He stopped for a second, and wiped his eyes.
“You know, I’d fought at Monte Cassino and Rome in the Big One, I’d had a ship torpedoed from under me and had to swim for six hours to get to land. But that night—well, it was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. Sally—poor, beautiful Sally—had a hell of a time with the birth. She was a small woman, and we were both little more than kids, you know? We didn’t know what we was doing at all, and when Jed’s head came out, I was so scared I think I would’ve rather faced a whole squadron of Krauts right at that moment.”
A knock came on the door. Laci took a second to come out of her entranced state, gave Mears an apologetic look and stood.
“You wanted room service?” asked the man at the door, his look signaling what he thought of customers who wanted whiskey at ten in the morning. Laci ignored him, signed for the booze and shut the door.
“Soda?” she asked Mears.
“No thank you, ma’am,” he said. “If you’re gonna drink good whiskey, I see no point in watering it down.”
“How about if you throw up easily?” she asked, moving to the bathroom to get the plastic cup that was there.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be drinking at all,” he said, standing to join her as she unwrapped the sanitary protection on the glass. “I appreciate the whiskey, and you letting me look at the pictures, Miss Powell. You don’t need to drink with me.”
“I’m alive right now when I should be dead, Mr. Mears,” she said, setting the cup down so that she could unscrew the cap on the Maker’s Mark (a forty-dollar extra on the police department’s hotel room tab). She poured herself a couple of fingers, handed the bottle to Caleb and opened the soda water. “I’m not going to worry about what I should and shouldn’t do anymore.”
He looked at her curiously. “You’ve got a story, too, don’t you?”
“A boring one,” she said, pouring club soda into her drink. “Cancer’s not nearly as exciting as delivering conjoined twins in the dark in a rainstorm.”
“Exciting,” he snorted. “Yeah, it was exciting, all right. You got a glass for me?”
“Just take the bottle,” Laci said. “What I’ve got should do me fine.”
He shrugged and lifted the bottle to his lips, drank. He swallowed, the Adam’s apple on his neck jiggling as the fiery liquid went down, set the whiskey on the bed table and sighed contentedly.
“I almost killed them right then,” he said.
Laci looked at him.
“I stood there in the flickering candlelight, looking at Sally, who was near unconscious by then, been ripped apart and was bleeding so strongly that I thought I’d never be able to stop the flow. And in my hands, covered with blood and slime, I had . . . I had this thing, this freakish spidery-looking tangle of limbs and heads and squalling screams, and my first impulse was to take them and throw them as hard as I could against the wall. You believe that?”
Laci took a long pull of her drink and didn’t speak. She moved past Mears, back to the bed, and sat down. He stayed in the doorway of the bathroom, looking at her with his black eyes. Finally, she answered.
“I think that’s natural,” she said. “Last night, when I saw them up there on the lighthouse, saw them staring down at me, I wanted to . . . I wanted them to be gone. I didn’t want them to exist. They scare me, Mr. Mears, and even though they’re at the hospital right now, they scare me still. And I don’t know why.”
“They went to that hospital before,” he said. “After Sally killed herself.”
Laci looked up at him.
“They were nine, just like they are in those pictures you showed me,” he said. “We kept them at the lighthouse because people were scared of ’em, and because they were odd.” He used the word carefully, as if he’d said it before a million times in reference to his sons. “They didn’t talk much. Not to us, anyway. When they were alone, and they thought we couldn’t hear ’em, they’d chitter like jaybirds in a cornfield—but as soon as they saw their mother or I coming, they’d clam up again. And you know what? It was scary, Miss Powell. Those children scared the living Jesus out of me. And Sally felt the same way—we’d be in our room at the Keeper’s house, and the twins were in the next room over, and it would be pitch black. I’d be lying there next to my wife, both of us awake though it was the middle of the night, neither of us saying a word but both of us knowing we were still conscious. And the boys never cried, never screamed, were always perfectly quiet throughout the night . . .
“Except sometimes, every few nights, they’d make a noise.”
“What noise?” asked Laci, gripping the plastic cup in her palms so tightly the material was bent.
“A scrabbling noise,” said Mears. “A noise like they was slowly, carefully crawling out of their crib in the middle of the night. A noise like one of them maybe slipped a little on the way down to the floor, had to grab for one of the slats real quick, and then it would be silent—me and Sally lying still and quiet in our bed, Sally crying without making any noise, and Jed and Jerry hanging there in the blackness, waiting to see if I’d get up, light a lantern and come see what they were doing. Sometimes, that stillness would go on for hours.”
“Did you ever go check?” Laci asked.
“No,” whispered Mears. “No, I never did. But I thought about it all the time. I’d be in the lantern room, changing the wick, and that image would come to me. And I’m sure Sally thought about it, too—she’d be back in the house with the boys, feeding ’em, changing ’em, watching ’em grow up into what you saw last night—and they never talked to her. Never told her they loved her. When they got old enough, they’d start to just disappear, go rambling in the woods for hours, come back all burrs and smudges and skinned knees, never say a word.
“Once, they disappeared all day. I got back to the house, Sally was frantic. She hadn’t seen them since breakfast, and she was about ready to bust a gut, she was so incoherent and terrified.
“Well, we went looking, and guess where we found them?”
Laci was startled. As if she would know . . .
But she did. Somehow, she did.
“Corpse Cove,” she said.
“Bingo,” whispered Caleb, and took another long pull from the bottle. “There’d been a wreck that I didn’t know about—some pleasure boat on a long fishing trip from Astoria. They hadn’t bothered to let anyone know where they were going, so none of us were on the lookout for ’em or anything. But they wrecked, all right, and the five people on board all washed up in the cove that day. And Jed and Jerry—they were there.”
“What were they doing?” asked Laci querulously. Her weak voice was back, and she didn’t care.
“Standing over those poor men, chittering,” said Caleb. “Standing over them, waving their arms, gabbling to each other in that language they had. I didn’t find ’em—Sally did. I just heard all about it that night, in bed. How they would sometimes kneel down, stroke the bloated skin of the dead men, smile and chant, and how Sally screamed at them while she spent ten minutes picking her way down the slope to get to ’em. But they never heard her, or just plain ignored her.”
He stopped again. Looked at Laci.
“You haven’t asked me how it’s possible,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“My boys,” he said. “They’re still nine years old. You saw ’em. But they was nine in the early sixties, and they haven’t aged any since then.”
“Maybe I’ve got a better perspective on some things than your normal girl,” she said. “I took a picture of a ghost once in a dressing room at a strip club. It was a murdered stripper, and she only showed up after the club closed. I spent two weeks there, and finally she showed herself. Your boys—they don’t shock me.”
“They’re not ghosts,” said Caleb. It’s like they stepped out of the past, if the past wasn’t just a memory. Like it was an actual place, and they finally made their way back.”
“I know,” she whispered. “They’re . . . I don’t know what they are. But they’re not dead. I like that analogy. Time travelers.”
“Not dead,” he said quietly, “but their mother is. Sally—I woke up one morning and Sally was gone. The boys were in their room, looking at a picture magazine I’d brought back from my last trip to the Falls, looking at it upside-down, like it didn’t matter. And I knew.
“She was dead at the base of the cliff,” he said, looking at the bottle before him as if judging how long it would take him to kill it. “She’d climbed up to the lantern room, let herself out onto the balcony, and jumped off the cliff side. I ran down both sets of ladders, fought my way down the hill to where she was, but the tide had come in by the time I got there, and I couldn’t even find a body to bury.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Laci. “Truly, Caleb—I’m sorry.”
“No call for that,” he said. “No call at all. You had nothing to do with it.”
“I’ve got something to do with this,” she said. “I just don’t know what.”
The phone blazed in its cradle, startling both of them. Laci put a hand to her chest and let out a little laugh.
“I see we’re both jumpy,” Caleb said, chuckling into the bottle.
“A little,” Laci said. “I should get this; it might be the Sheriff. They wanted me to stay in town.”
Caleb waved a permissive gesture at her.
“I’ll just sit here with my bottle quietly,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell him I’m here. I don’t really want to talk to anyone else about this.”
Laci nodded, then reached out to pick up the receiver.
“Hello?” she said.
“Ms. Powell?”
“Yes—is this Sheriff Danton?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Listen, Ms. Powell. You need to turn on your television right now. Jesus Christ—you’re never gonna believe this. Channel 10. I’ll wait.”
“Okay,” Laci said. She shot a puzzled look toward Caleb, who was watching her intently. Then she walked over to the TV and clicked it on.
“. . . again, the twin boys, apparently from eight to ten years old and as yet unnamed, managing to somehow get outside their room on the third floor of the Calamity Falls Children’s Hospital, and are now considered to be missing somewhere in the vicinity of the Falls . . .”
“What the hell?” Laci asked, putting her hand to her mouth and dropping onto the chair.
Caleb put the bottle down and crossed his arms over his chest, holding himself.
“. . . you’re going to see this amazing Channel 10 exclusive one more time, Diane, and I have to say this is probably the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my fourteen years as a broadcast journalist. This footage was captured just a short time ago by our own cameraman John Davis while we were waiting outside the hospital for word on the mystery twins that had been found on the lighthouse . . .”
The screen went blank for a moment, then Laci gasped.
Caleb sucked in his breath.
The screen showed the outside wall of the Children’s Hospital. It was old gray stone with rows of double-paned windows on each floor. About thirty feet up, battered by wind and lashing rain, Jedidiah and Jeremiah were carefully making their way down the side of the building. The cameraman was talking off-screen, but the noise of the storm whipped away his words.
The children scuttled down the gray bricks, moving headfirst toward the ground. Their arms and legs were somehow able to find minuscule perches, keeping them from falling, and they worked in perfect harmony. It gave a gangly, over-jointed impression to their movement.
“Oh my God,” Laci whispered.
The children stopped their downward scuttle for a moment about halfway to the ground and looked directly at the camera. Even through the rain their eyes shone like black diamonds. Lightning crashed overhead and they tensed, as though they might fall.
“So that’s how they did it,” muttered Caleb. He began to rub his arm self-consciously.
Jedidiah and Jeremiah looked at each other, and Laci could see that they were talking to themselves—chittering, Caleb had called it. Then they swiveled their heads in unison toward one of the tall pines standing nearby.
They tensed their legs and leapt into space.
Laci gasped.
They sailed into the darkness, their arms and legs spread as though they were making snow angels. When they hit the tree, they bounced, disappearing briefly into the dense green foliage. There was a crash as they hit the branches and off-camera several onlookers screamed.
The boys were lost for a moment as the tree shook, then they reappeared, crawling spider-like down the trunk. When they got to the ground, they leapt to their feet and scurried off into the deeper darkness of the woods.
“Holy shit,” Laci breathed.
On the screen lightning flashed again, and as the thunder pealed across the sky there was a brief, dazzling instant where the twins were perfectly outlined, their loping gait caught in the final frames of film, their arms waving like an anemone in the rain. The light gone, the screen went black.
“. . . Sheriff Danton has asked people to be on the lookout . . .”
“Oh, crap!” Laci said. She got up and stumbled to the phone, her feet unstable. She picked it up with two hands and held it to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Laci, goddammit,” Danton said. His voice was angry. “I don’t have time to sit on the phone all night . . .”
“Sorry,” she said. There was a moment of silence.
“So did you see it?” Danton asked. The anger was gone—now there was something in his voice that sounded dangerously like fear.
“I saw it,” said Laci. “I can’t believe it.”
“Well, I didn’t either. But it happened. Any idea where they might be headed?”
“No, I . . .” she stopped, then, as Caleb put a hand on her shoulder. Then she nodded.
“I have no idea, Sheriff.” She turned and looked into Caleb’s pale, frightened face. He looked a hundred years old.
“Do you think they might be going back to the lighthouse?”
“Do I think they’re going to the lighthouse?” she repeated, making sure Caleb could hear. He immediately shook his head no.
“No, Sheriff,” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the old man’s. “Why would they? I think they probably just ran off into the storm. If they don’t die of exposure, I’m sure someone will see them and call it in.”
“That pair would be hard not to notice, I guess,” Danton said. “Okay, Ms. Powell. If I have time, I’ll keep you informed about what’s going on here. I still need to talk to you, though, so don’t go anywhere. I’ll call you by tomorrow at the latest.”
“Goodnight, Sheriff, and thank you for calling me,” Laci said.
“Goodnight, Ms. Powell.” There was a pause, then a click.
The lights flickered, once, as she put the phone down.
“We have to go,” said Caleb. He reached for his coat, began to slip into it.
“To the lighthouse, right?” Laci asked.
“That’s the only place they could be going. It’s where they went before.”
