Time Travel Omnibus, page 859
The figure stopped for a moment and moved its head from side to side like he was checking out the houses. The man had to have 20/20 vision no matter how old he was: when Bennett was last outside he wasn’t able to see across the street let alone distinguish one house from another.
When the man started moving again, Bennett thought there was something familiar about him. Maybe he’d come out of Jack Coppertone’s house across the street . . . it wasn’t Jack himself—too old, though Bennett still couldn’t see the man’s face—but it could be Jenny’s father. Bennett rubbed the glass and remembered that the mist was outside the window, not inside. But, no, it couldn’t be Jenny’s father—he was a short man, and fat. Whereas the man walking across the street was tall and slim, a soldier’s gait, straight-backed and confident . . . despite the fact that he had just had to stop and check which house he was heading for. Whatever, and whoever the man was, Bennett didn’t think he posed a problem . . . and he could be in difficulty. Lost at the very least. And it would be good to speak with somebody.
He moved back to the door, released the last bolt and pulled it open.
The man’s shoes on the black surface of the street made a click-clack sound. The mist swirling around his arms and legs looked like an oriental dancer’s veils, clinging one second and voluminous the next . . . and brought with it now the unmistakable sound of distant voices muttering and whispering. Then his face appeared, frowning and unsure, one eye narrowed in an effort to make some sense of the house and the man standing before him, the shadow of the hat brim moving up and down on his forehead as he strode forward.
He looked wary, this fog-brought stranger from afar. And well he might do.
The house, Bennett knew, he had never seen before.
And when he had last seen the man standing before him in this alien street, the man had been little more than a boy.
The whispering voices echoed the word “boy” in Bennett’s head like circling gulls warning of bad weather out on the coast.
He successfully fought off the urge to cut and run back into the house—to throw the deadbolts across—how appropriate that word suddenly seemed: dead-bolts—to bar the stranger’s way . . . to erase the errant foolishness of what he was thinking, of the silly déjà vu sense he had ever seen the man before. But he was just a man, this stranger to Forest Plains . . . a man lost and alone, maybe with a broken-down Olds or Chevy a couple of blocks parked up somewhere down near the intersection with Main Street, a trusted and faithful vehicular retainer that he cleaned and polished every Sunday but which now languished with a flooded carburetor or a busted muffler trailing down on the road.
The man stopped and looked at Bennett, just twenty or thirty feet between them, the man out on the sidewalk and Bennett standing in the open doorway of his home, screen door leaning against him, the fresh and welcoming lights spilling out onto the mist which held their shine on its back and shifted it around like St. Elmo’s Fire.
“Hey,” Bennett said softly.
The man shifted his head to one side, looked to the left and then to the right. Then nodded.
Bennett crumpled the handbill into a ball and thrust it into his pants pocket. “Quite a morning.”
“Quite a morning,” came the response.
It was as though someone had pumped air or water or some kind of helium gas into Bennett’s head. There were things in there—sleeping things, memory things that lay dormant and dust-covered like old furniture in a forgotten home that you suddenly and unexpectedly went back to one magical day . . . things awoken by three simple and unexciting words delivered in a familiar voice and a familiar drawl the accuracy of which he thought he had misplaced—or, more realistically, had filed away and ignored.
These things grew to full height and shape and revealed themselves as remembered incidents . . . and the incidents brought remembered voices and remembered words: these were real memories . . . not the cloying waves of rose-colored-eyepiece nostalgia that he got watching a re-run of favorite childhood TV show or hearing a snatch of a onetime favorite song. He saw this man—many versions of him, each older or younger than the one before—playing ball, laughing, talking . . . saw him asleep.
“You lost?”
The man looked around for a few seconds and then looked back at Bennett. “I guess so. Where am I?”
“This is Forest Plains.”
“Where’s that?”
Bennett shrugged and tried to stop his knees shaking. “It’s just a town. Where are you heading?”
“I’m going—” The man paused and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he smiled at Bennett. “Home,” he said. “I’m going home.”
Bennett nodded. “You want to come in for a while? Have a cup of coffee?” He had never heard of a ghost that came in for coffee but, what the hell . . . all of this was crazy so anything was possible. He glanced along the street and saw that the mist seemed to be thinning out, the first vague shapes and outlines of the houses opposite taking hesitant form.
The man followed Bennett’s stare and when he turned back there was a wistful smile on his mouth. “Can’t stay too long,” he said.
“No,” Bennett agreed. He nodded to the fog. “Bad day.”
The man turned around but didn’t comment. Then he said, “You ever think it’s like some kind of vehicle? Like a massive ocean liner?”
“What? The fog?”
The man nodded, gave a little flick of his shoulders, and stared back into the mist. “Like some huge machine,” he said, “drifting along soundlessly and then—” he snapped his fingers “—suddenly pulling into a port or a station, somewhere we’ve not seen for a long time . . . sometimes for so long it’s like . . . like we’ve never seen it at all. And it reveals something that you weren’t expecting . . . weren’t expecting simply because you don’t know how far you’ve traveled.” He turned back. “How far not just in distance but in time.”
“In time?” Bennett said, glancing out at the swirling mist. “Like a time machine,” he said.
The man smiled, the intensity suddenly falling away. “Yeah, like a time machine. Or something like that.”
Bennett stepped aside and ushered the man into the house.
The man who looked for all the world like John Differing removed his hat and held it by the brim with both hands at his waist. Looking around the kitchen, he said, “Nice place.”
Bennett closed the door and stood alongside the man, noting with an inexplicable sadness that he seemed to be around four or five inches shorter than he remembered. He followed the man’s stare and drank in the microwave oven, the polished electric hobs, the chest freezer over by the back door, the small TV set on the breakfast counter. What would these things look like to someone who had not been around since 1972?
“We like it,” Bennett responded simply. “So, coffee?”
The man shrugged as Bennett walked across the kitchen to the sink. “Whatever you’re making.”
“Coffee’s fresh. Shelley—my wife—she made it. It might have gotten a little strong, sitting. I’ll just boil some water.”
“Uh huh. She here?”
“Shelley? No, she’s out. Shopping. Christmas shopping. With her sister. Does it every year.” Placing the kettle on its electric base, Bennett pulled a chair from the table. “You want to sit down?”
The man shook his head. “No, I don’t think I can stay that long. Don’t want to get too settled.”
“Right.”
The man placed his hat on the table and straightened his shoulders. “Mind if I look around?”
“No, no . . . go right ahead. Coffee’ll be ready in a couple of minutes.”
He watched the old man walk off along the hallway and tried to think of all the things he wanted to ask him. Things like, what was it like . . . where he was now? Things like, did he know who he was . . . and that he was dead? Did he even know that Bennett was—
“This your office?” The voice drifted along the hallway and broke Bennett’s train of thought.
“Yes.” The kettle clicked off and Bennett poured water into the electric coffee jug.
“You work from home?” The voice had moved back into the hallway.
“Yeah. I gave up my day job about five years ago. I write full-time now.” He went to the refrigerator and got a carton of milk.
Pouring steaming coffee into a couple of mugs, Bennett wondered what the hell he was doing. The fog and the fact that it had cut him off from civilization had messed up his head. A stupid handbill—he felt in his pocket to make sure it was still there . . . make sure he hadn’t imagined it—some half-baked ramblings about the fog maybe being a time machine that the dead used to travel back and forth, and the appearance of a man who looked a little like his father had freaked him out. Looked like his father! What the hell was that? He hadn’t even seen his father for twenty-seven years.
He shook his head and added milk to the mugs. The fact was he had invited some guy into the house, for crissakes. Shelley would go ape-shit when she found out. If he told her, of course. Putting the milk back in the refrigerator, he suddenly thought that maybe Shelley would find out . . . when she got home and found her husband lying in the kitchen with a knife in his—
“What kind of stuff do you write?” the man asked, standing right behind him in the kitchen.
“Shit!” He spun around and banged into the refrigerator door.
“Pardon me?”
“You startled me.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I’m sorry for—”
“Didn’t mean to do that.”
“Really, it’s okay.” He closed the refrigerator door and took a deep breath. “Guess I must be a little nervous.” He waved a hand at the window. “The fog.”
The man walked across to the counter by the sink and nodded to the window. “Looks like it’s clearing up.” He reached a hand out towards the two mugs and said, “Either?”
Nodding, Bennett said, “Yeah, neither of them have sugar, though. There’s a bowl over to your—”
“I don’t take it.” He picked up one of the mugs and, closing his eyes, took a sip. “Mmm, now that’s good. You don’t know how good coffee tastes until you haven’t had it for a while.”
The man continued to sip at his coffee, eyes downcast, as though studying the swirling brown liquid.
Bennett considered just coming right out with it there and then, confronting this familiar man with the belief that he was Bennett’s very own father. But the more he watched him, the more Bennett wondered whether he was just imagining things . . . even worse, whether he was in some way trying to bring his father back. After all, who ever heard of a handbill that advertised returning dead relatives. He may just be putting two and two together and getting five.
On the other hand, maybe it was his father. It could well be that there were forces or powers at large in the universe that made such things possible. Maybe Rod Serling had had it right after all. Maybe the dead did use mist as a means of getting around—so many movies had already figured that one out . . . and maybe they did travel in time.
Bennett took a sip of his own coffee and thought of something he had often pondered over: if a chair falls over in an empty house miles from anywhere, does it make a sound? Natural laws dictate that it must do, but there were plenty of instances of natural law seemingly not figuring out. The thing was—the thing with the chair in the deserted house—there was no way of proving or disproving it . . . because the only way to prove it was to have someone present at the falling over, which destroyed one of the criteria for the experiment. So maybe whatever one wanted to believe could hold true.
The same applied to the man in Bennett’s kitchen. So long as Bennett didn’t actually come right out and ask him and risk the wrong response.
John Differing? No, name’s Bill Patterson, live over to Dawson Corner, got a flooded Packard couple blocks down the street, and a wife in it—Elite’s her name—busting to get home soon as this fog’s cleared up
it was safe to assume the man was Bennett’s father. And the plain fact was there were so many things that supported such a belief. Thinks like . . .
“My father drank his coffee that way, sipping,” Bennett said, pushing the encroaching silence back into the corners of the room where it didn’t pose a threat.
The man looked up at Bennett and smiled. “Yeah?”
Bennett nodded. “Looked a lot like you do, too.”
“That right?”
Bennett took a deep breath. “He died more than twenty-seven years ago. He was fifty-eight.” He took another sip and said, “How old are you? If you don’t mind my—”
“Don’t mind at all. I’m fifty-eight myself.”
“Huh,” Bennett said, shaking his head. “Quite a coincidence.”
“Looks like it’s a day for them,” the man said as he lowered his cup down in front of his waist. “My boy—my son—he always wanted to be a writer.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I must say, I never had much faith in that. Seemed like a waste of time to me.” He lifted the cup again. “But a man can be wrong. Could be he made a go of it.” His mouth broke into a soft smile. “Could even be he’ll get real successful a little ways down the track.”
Bennett wanted to ask if the man ever saw his son these days, but that would have been breaking the rules of the game . . . just as it would have been courting disaster. The response could be Sure, saw Jack just last week and he’s doing fine. And Bennett didn’t want that response. But the more they talked, the more sure he became.
They talked of the man’s past and of the friends he used to have.
They talked of places he had lived and things he had done.
And in amongst all the talk, all the people and all the places and all the things, there were people and places and things that rang large bells in Bennett’s mind—so many coincidences—but there were also several people and places and things that didn’t mean anything at all. Things Bennett had never known about his father. But he still refrained from asking anything that might place the man in some kind of cosmic glitch . . . or that might provoke an answer that would break the spell.
In turn, Bennett told the man things about his father . . . things that not only was he sure his father had never known but also that he himself hadn’t known. Not reallyknown . . . not known in that surface area of day-to-day consciousness that we can access whenever we want.
And each time Bennett said something, the man nodded slowly, a soft smile playing on his lips, and he would say, “Is that right?” or “You don’t say” or, more than once, “You make him sound like quite a man.”
“He was. Quite a man.”
For a second, the man looked like he was about to say something, the edge of his tongue peeking between those gently smiling lips
thank you
but he seemed to think better of it and whatever it had been was consigned to silence.
Bennett placed his mug on the counter and pulled the handbill from his pocket. “You believe in ghosts?” he asked.
“Ghosts?”
“Mm hmm.” He moved across to the man and showed him the handbill. “Got this today, in the newspaper. Ever hear of anything like that?”
The man shook his head. “Can’t say that I have, no.”
“You think such a thing is possible?”
The man shrugged. “They do say anything’s possible. Maybe ghosts see everything in one hit . . . the then, the now and the to come. Maybe time doesn’t mean anything at all to them. Could be they just hop right on board of their fog time machine and go wherever or whenever they’ve a mind.”
Bennett looked again at the handbill, his eyes tracing those curly letters. “But why would they want to come back . . . ghosts, I mean?”
“Maybe because they forget what things were like? Forget the folks they left behind? They say the living forget the dead after a while: well, maybe it works both ways.” He shrugged again, looked down into his coffee. “Who knows.”
Was the man nervous? Bennett frowned. Maybe he was breaking some kind of celestial rules by moving the conversation to a point where the man would have no choice but to corroborate Bennett’s belief . . . and maybe that would mean—
He thrust the handbill back into his pocket and the man looked immediately relieved, if still a little apprehensive.
“Yeah, well,” Bennett said in a dismissive tone, “what are ghosts but memories?”
The man nodded. “Right. Memories. I like that. And what is Heaven but a small town . . . a small town like this one. A small town that’s just a little ways up or down the track.”
Now it was Bennett’s turn to nod. “You know,” Bennett went on, “we used to play a game, back when I was a kid, where we used to say which sense we would keep if we were forced to give up all but one of the senses, and why.
“Kids would say, ‘hearing’ and they’d say ‘because I couldn’t listen to my records,’ or they’d say ‘sight,’ ‘because I couldn’t read my comic books or watch TV or go to the movies.’ ”
“And what did you say?”
Bennett smiled. This was a story he’d told his father on more than one occasion. “I used to say I wouldn’t give up my memory, because without my memory nothing that had ever happened to me would mean anything. Everything I am—forget the skin and flesh and bone, forget the muscles and the sinews and the arteries—everything I am is memories.”
The man smiled. “You ever stop to think that maybe you’re a ghost?”
Bennett laughed. “Did you?”
And the man joined in on the laughter. “An angel, maybe.”
“An angel?”
The man shrugged. “A messenger. That’s what angels are . . . messengers.”
“Yeah? And what’s your message?”
The man laughed. “Oh, that would be telling now. Wouldn’t it.”
Bennett suddenly realized he could now see the house across the street quite clearly. Could see the front door opening . . . could see the unmistakable outline of Jenny Coppertone stepping out onto the front step, staring up into the sky. Then she turned around and went back into the house.
