Time Travel Omnibus, page 858
He’d heard two of them talking in the drugstore just the day before yesterday, the one of them calling over to the other—Hey Skugs, get a load of that, will ya!—holding up a comic book, his eyes glaring proudly as though he were responsible for the book and the story and the artwork. And the second boy had dutifully sidled up the aisle to his friend, and equally dutifully exclaimed Wow! as he was shown a couple of interior pages. Wow! Neato!
Bennett had wanted to interrupt, stop the boys in the middle of their comic book explorations, and ask, What kind of a name do you have to wind up with Skugs? But he knew it wouldn’t make sense. It would be Charles or James—which would only explain “Chuck” or “Jim”—and the surname would probably be Daniels or Henderson, both equally unhelpful. And that would have meant him having to ask, So why “Skugs” ? and then the boys would have looked at each other, shrugged, dumped the comic book back on the rack and run out of the store giggling.
Bennett suddenly felt that he wanted to be standing out in an early-morning street, alone with an invading mist, hair-plastered onto his forehead, Schwinn between his legs and his old leather Grit sack around his shoulder, drinking in the sights and smells and sounds of a life still new . . . still filled with so many possibilities. Suddenly he wanted a secret name of his own . . . one that made no sense at all and that would make adults frown and shake their heads as he ran off laughing into the life that lay ahead.
He wondered what the secret name was for the boy in the street and, for a second, considered asking him. But then he thought better of it. At least he knew this kid’sreal name: it was Will Cerf.
Bennett waved. “Hey Will. Looks a little misty out there,” he shouted as the paper hit the screen door below him, its thud sounding like a pistol crack.
“Fog,” the boy retorted, his face serious, brow furrowed.
Fog. Such an evocative word when spoken by a voice and a mind still alive to things not so easily explained by the meteorological charts on the morning news programs.
The boy stopped the bike and straddled it, one foot on the curb, and waved an arm back in the direction he’d just ridden. “Coming in thick and fast,” he said, sounding for all the world like a tow-headed Paul Revere thumbing back over his shoulder at the advancing British troops. For a second or so, Bennett glanced in the direction indicated and felt a small gnawing mixture of apprehension and wonder.
“Down by the scrapyard,” Will Cerf added. “Cold, too,” he almost concluded. “And damp.” The boy rubbed his arms to confirm his report.
Bennett nodded absently and looked back along the street.
Already the first fingers of fog had consolidated, holding tight onto picket fence and garage handle, wrapping themselves across fender and grill, posting sentries beside tree trunks and fall-pipes, settling down alongside discarded or forgotten toys lying dew-covered on the leaf-stained lawns.
“Gotta go,” Will Cerf said, a hint of sagacious regret in his voice.
“Me, too,” Bennett said. “You take care now.”
The boy already had his head down, was already reaching into that voluminous bag of news and views, his feet pumping down on those pedals, the tires shhhhing along the pavement. “Will do,” came the reply as another airborne newspaper flew through the mist, gossamer fingers prodding and poking it as it passed by. “You, too,” he added over his shoulder.
And then, as if by magic, Will Cerf disappeared into the whiteness banked across the street in front of Jack and Jenny Coppertone’s house. The whiteness accepted him—greedily, Bennett thought . . . immediately wishing he hadn’t used that word—and stretched over to Audrey Chermola’s Dodge, checking out the JESUS SAVES sticker on the back fender before swirling around the rain barrel out in front of her garage, climbing up the pipe and over the flat roof to the back yard beyond.
Bennett pulled the window closed.
Outside visibility was worsening.
Now the power lines and their silent bird population had gone. Even the posts were indistinct, like they were only possible ideas for posts . . . hastily sketched suggestions for where they might be placed. The Hells Angels gulls had gone, too. He leaned forward and looked up into the air to see if he could see any shapes negotiating the milky currents, but the sky appeared to be deserted.
Deserted and white.
As he watched, a milky swirl of that whiteness rushed at the glass of the window, making him pull back with a start . . . it was as though the mist had momentarily sensed him watching it, like a shark suddenly becoming aware of the presence of the caged underwater cameraman and his deep-sixed recording lens. Then the cushion of mist moved off, lumbering, up and over the house . . . out of sight. Bennett craned forward and tried to look up after it . . . to see what it was doing now.
Just for a second, he considered running to the spare bedroom, where Shelley always kept a window wide to air the room . . .
But then his bladder reminded him it needed emptying. He turned away from the window and padded out to the bathroom.
Taking a pee, Bennett was suddenly pleased that Shelley wasn’t downstairs. Pleased that she hadn’t heard the newspaper hit the screen door because then she would open it, bring the paper inside into the warmth.
And that would mean she would let the fog inside.
He hmphed and shook his head, flushed the toilet.
Downstairs, on the radio, The Mamas and Papas were complaining that all the leaves were brown. Bennett knew how they felt: roll on summer!
He closed the bathroom door and stepped into the warmth of the shower, feeling it revitalize his skin.
Through the steamed-up glass of the shower stall, Bennett could see the whiteness pressing against the bathroom window. Like it was watching him. Lathering his hair, he tried to recall whether he had heard the radio anchorman mention the fog.
After the shower, Bennett shaved.
The man staring back at him looked familiar but older. The intense light above the mirror seemed to accentuate the pores and creases, picked out the wattled fold of skin beneath his chin . . . a fold that, no matter how hard he tried and how hard he stretched back his head, stoically refused to flatten out. That same light also highlighted the shine of head through what used to be thick hair, the final few stalks now looking like a platoon of soldiers abandoned by their comrades. If he were still able to have a secret name now, it would be “Baldy” or “Tubby” or maybe even “Turkeyneck.” As he shaved, he tried to think of what names he did have as a boy: he was sure he used to have one, and that it had annoyed him for a time, but he could only think of Ben.
He pulled on the same things he’d been wearing last night. Despite the fact he had two closets literally brimming with shirts and sweaters, jogging pants and old denims that were too threadbare to wear outside the confines of the house, Bennett considered the wearing of yesterday’s clothing as something of a treat . . . and something naughty, something he could get away with the way he used to get away with it as a kid.
There were so few things an adult could get away with.
Feeling better, more refreshed, he opened the bathroom door and stepped out onto the landing. As he neared the staircase he could hear thick static growling downstairs and, just for a second, he almost shouted out his wife’s name as a question, even though he knew she was long gone to the mall.
He padded downstairs slower than usual, checking the layout over the rim of the handrail as the next floor came into view.
In the kitchen everything was neat and Shelley had left out the cutting board, a jar of marmalade and a new loaf out of the freezer. The coffee smelled good. But first things first: he had to attend to the radio. Bennett leaned on the counter and pushed a couple of the preset buttons to zone in on another station . . . anything to relieve that static. But each time he hit a button, it was the same . . . didn’t even falter, just kept on crackling and hissing and . . .
whispering
something else. He leaned closer, put his ear against the speaker and listened. Was there a station there? Could he hear someone talking, talking quietly . . . very quietly indeed? Maybe that was it: maybe it was the volume. He twizzled the dial on the side but the static just got louder.
Bennett stepped back and looked at the radio, frowning. He had been sure he could hear something behind the static but now it was gone. He switched it off and on again, got the same, and then switched it off. He’d watch TV
After flicking the set forward and backward through all the available channels, Bennett gave up. Static, static everywhere. Static and voices, soft faraway whispering voices . . . saying things—he was sure they were there and they were saying things, but he just couldn’t get them to register. He tossed the remote onto the sofa and sat for a few minutes in the silence.
Coffee. That was what he needed. That would make things right.
He strolled back into the kitchen, poured a cup and walked across the hall into his office.
The cumulative smell of books and words met him as it always did, welcomed him back for another day.
He powered up the old Aptiva, heard it click once—the single bell-tone it always made—and then watched the screen go fuzzy.
“Huh? What the hell’s going on here?” he asked the room.
The millions of words and sentences tucked up in the double-stacked shelves of books and magazines shuffled amongst themselves but, clearly unable to come up with a good response, remained silent.
Bennett placed his coffee on his mouse mat and shuffled the mouse. Nothing. The computer wouldn’t even boot up. He pressed the volume button on the CD-ROM speakers and heard the static invade his office.
Along with the faraway whispering voices.
He flipped the Rolodex until he got the number for the maintenance people and pressed the hands-free key on the fax/telephone at the side of his desk. This time he knew there were voices in that white haze of crackle coming from the fax machine . . . and the voices sounded like they were chuckling.
Forgetting the coffee, he went out into the lounge and picked up the handset of the house line.
It was the sound of the sea and the wind, the hiss of the tallest trees bending to the elements, the hum of the Earth spinning. All this and nothing more. Nothing more except for the unmistakable sound of someone—something—calling his name . . . calling it as though in a dream.
Now the panic really set in. It had already been lit and its flames fanned without him even seeing the first sparks, but when Bennett walked quickly to the front door, opened it and stepped out onto the stoop, the fire became a conflagration in his stomach.
The fog was everywhere, thick and solid, unmoving and ungiving, leaving no single discernible landmark of the street he and Shelley had lived in for more than twenty years. It was an alien landscape—no, not so much a landscape as a canvas . . . a blank canvas sitting on an old easel in a musty loft somewhere in the Twilight Zone, and Bennett was the only dab of color to be found on it.
And he felt even he was fading fast.
He stared towards the drive at the side of the house and was pleased to see that he could make out the fence running between his property and Jerry and Amy Sondheim’s. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or dismayed by the fact that Shelley had the car. Then he decided he was relieved: if the car had been there, he would have gone to it, slid into his familiar position behind the wheel and driven off.
Driven off where? a soft voice asked quietly in the back of his head.
Bennett nodded. He couldn’t have driven anywhere in this. Nobody could drive anywhere in this. Christ, what the hell was it?
He stared into the whiteness trying to see if there was just the tiniest hint of movement. There was none. The fog looked like a painted surface, as though the entire planet was sinking into a sea of mist, submerging itself forever, removing all traces of recognizability. No radio or TV, no telephones . . . not even any Internet! Was this the way it was all going to end? The whole planet being cut off from itself as though nothing existed? As though nothing had ever existed?
It was right then—as Bennett was looking first to the left along Sycamore Street to where it intersected with Masham Lane, trying to imagine the old bench Charley Sputterenk erected in memory of his wife, Hazel, and then to the right, down towards Main Street, trying to see if he could hear the distant sound of moving traffic—that he heard something moving in the fog.
He snapped his head back to face front and stared, stared hard. But he couldn’t see anything . . . except now the mist seemed to be swirling a little, right in front of his face . . . as though something was pushing it towards him. Something coming towards him and displacing it . . .
“Hello?” His voice sounded weak and querulous and he hated himself for it. Hated himself but was unable to do anything about it. The mist continued to swirl and Bennett’s eyes started to ache with the effort.
“Somebody out there? Need any help?”
This time he had tried to make his tone initially mock-serious—Jesus Christ, is this some weather or what?—and then helpful . . . a fogbound Samaritan calling to a lost and weary traveler.
The sound came again—a hesitant shuffle of shoes on sidewalk, perhaps?—and was accompanied by what sounded to be a cough or a low, throaty rumble.
Bennett took a step back, reaching his hand behind until it touched the reassuring surface of the doorjamb, and felt something under his foot. Quickly glancing down he saw the folded newspaper. There was something sticking out of it, a gaudily-colored handbill protruding from the printed pages.
He bent down and scooped up the paper and its contents and then backed fully into the house, allowing the screen door to slam and pushing the house door closed without turning around, and securing the deadbolts top and bottom before turning the key.
There had been no sound out there, no sound at all. And there should have been. Even if the fog had shrouded the entire county—though it was far more likely that it had merely entrapped Forest Plains, and possibly only a couple of the town’s many streets—he should have been able to stand on his own doorstep and hear something . . . a siren, a voice, a car engine, someone’s dog howling at the sudden claustrophobic curtain that had dropped down.
But it was silent out there.
More silent than he could ever have imagined.
And he should have been able to see something . . . anything at all: a glimpse of windowpane across the street, the muted and silhouetted outlines of roof gable or drainpipe, the indistinct shape of a parked car whose owner was either unable or unwilling to brave the murk.
But there was nothing to see at all through the whiteness.
The thought came to him . . . somehow I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto
that it wasn’t Sycamore Street at all. And it wasn’t Forest Plains. And the mall where Shelley was shopping-till-she-dropped with her sister Lisa was a world away.
He went to the window at the side of the door and looked out into the street. It was the same as before. He could see his own drive and his own lawn run down to the sidewalk, and he could see the vague outline of the road . . . but nothing more.
The handbill slipped out of the newspaper and fluttered to the floor at his feet just as he thought for a moment that he could see a shape forming out in the whiteness, but nothing appeared . . . though the mist now seemed to be swirling thickly in the middle of the street.
Bennett lifted the handbill and stared at it.
It was just a regular-sized insert, like any of the ones that dropped out of Bennett’s Men’s Journal or Shelley’s Vanity Fair . . . ablaze with color and just three lines of curlicued fonts, seraphed letters and ubiquitous exclamation marks, all of the text bold, some of it italicized.
It read:
Congratulations to Bennett Differing!
in huge letters in the very center of the sheet, with Bennett’s name appearing to have been typed into place on a line. Below that, the handbill announced
YOU HAVE WON A VISIT FROM YOUR FATHER!
with the words appearing in slightly smaller lettering, employing the best sideshow-barker’s spiel, and in a typesetting nightmare of a mixture of small caps, dropped first letters and the typed-in words “Your Father.” And then:
Have a Good Time!
And that was that.
Bennett turned the sheet over to see if there was anything on the back, but there was only a pattern of swirling lines, like the ones printed for security on foreign currency.
Won? How could he have won anything when he didn’t recall even entering any competitions? And his father? John Differing had been dead some twenty-seven years. Maybe it was some kind of gag. Maybe everyone on the street—maybe even everyone in Forest Plains—was receiving a similar handbill in their newspaper. Bennett wished he could ask young Will Cerf to look in the other papers he was delivering to check out that particular theory.
Outside, a haurrrnk! Sounded . . . like a ship’s horn.
Bennett looked up at the window and saw a shape forming out of the thick swirls of mist in the middle of the street. Someone was walking towards the house . . . walking slowly, even awkwardly. Someone had been hurt.
With the handbill still clutched in his hand, Bennett rushed to the door and started to release the deadbolts. But then he stopped.
Who was this person? Maybe it was some kind of weirdo, some transient brought in with the fog . . . like the guys that howl at a full moon. And here was Bennett busily opening the door to let him inside.
He pushed the top bolt home again and moved back to the window.
The shape was now fully emerged from the mist: it was a man, a man in a dark suit, no topcoat—no topcoat! and in this weather!—and wearing a hat. Bennett immediately assumed an age for the man—he had to be older than seventy, maybe even eighty, to be wearing a hat. Hardly anyone he knew wore hats these days, at least around Forest Plains.
