Kzine Issue 19

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  “Could you come with us?” the first man says.

  Dumey looks from twin to twin. “What’s going on?”

  “We just want to ask you a few questions. Won’t take but a minute.”

  In the gathering darkness on Benefit Street, Dumey imagines a Providence police car pulling up with its back door yawning wide and a sign saying ABANDON HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. But no car appears, and the twins don’t cuff him or read him his rights. They lead him to the south wing of the Colonial Apartments. And then he sees that this isn’t the police at all, but Rhode Island School of Design security.

  The cops—Dumey still thinks of them as cops—usher him into an office lit in warm yellow. There’s a desk and two chairs, a small refrigerator in one corner buzzing like it’s filled with hornets, and an oversized sign on the wall with the Rhode Island flag of anchor encircled with stars, along with the state motto HOPE. Dumey takes one of the proffered chairs.

  A third man swaggers in, a heavy-set type with a mop of graying hair, the kind who might have played linebacker in college but let himself go. He looks the new arrival over.

  “You look anxious.”

  Dumey peers up at them beneath the bill of his olive Army ballcap. He wears granny specs that slightly magnify his eyes. “Someone gonna tell me what this is about?”

  The twin who first stopped him replies. “Elizabeth—” he pauses for effect—“Schall.”

  Dumey keeps his face level. “Oh.”

  The ex-linebacker goes on: “A man matching your description has been sighted more than once in this area—on this street, on Angell, and once at Starbucks—watching this young lady.”

  He hesitates. “Ah… okay.”

  “Okay what?” Twin Two asks, sitting on the edge of the desk.

  Another pause. Dumey chews his lip, squinting, then straightens up. “Yes. All right. That was me.”

  Twin One jumps in. “You have been stalking this young lady, then?”

  Dumey cringes at the S-word. Both twins break into chatter at once: “And downtown—” “Further out east on Angell—” “—and at the mall!”

  “And so,” Linebacker says, “we’re just wondering why.”

  Dumey’s face warps into a nervous grin. He shrugs. “Coincidence?” Watching them, his face falls. “Okay, maybe not so much.”

  Linebacker folds his arms. “What do you do in your spare time, Mr. Dumey?”

  Dumey’s face flushes red. “That’s none of your—”

  He stops. The crimson fades, then his face pales and for a moment his eyes glaze over, before snapping back again.

  “Guys, look. What do you want? You want me to leave this girl alone? Fine, I’ll leave her alone. I give you my word. Okay? Will that do it?” He shivers.

  Everyone studies him. “What is it, Mr. Dumey?” Linebacker asks.

  Dumey squirms as if ants are swarming underneath his clothes. His face glistens with sweat. “I’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

  “Just be calm, sir. Would you like a cup of water?” Linebacker motions toward the cooler. “We still need to—”

  “Now!”

  Twin Two sits upright. Twin One just stares.

  “Heart attack,” Dumey croaks.

  Linebacker doesn’t move. “You sure? Is there pain in your left arm?”

  “It’s—well—guys, look, I’m serious. I have to—”

  “Mr. Dumey.” Linebacker positions himself between suspect and door. “You are not going anywhere, sir, until we’ve talked to you.”

  Dumey’s face was contorted; now it crumples a second time. He blows out a long, deep breath, forces his body into stillness. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Believe what?” Twin Two relaxes again. His counterpart leans back against the desk’s front edge.

  “But you have to—could one of you go about two blocks up this street, two blocks South, and see what’s going on?”

  “And what would that be?” Linebacker asks.

  “It’s about her. Just go, all right? Then I’ll stay here all night if you want.”

  “Why?” Twin Two duplicates Linebacker’s folding of arms.

  Dumey makes a strangled noise. His eyes are about to pop out. “Just do it!”

  Linebacker scratches his nose. “I’m genuinely curious.”

  “I get these urges—” Dumey stops himself. “These itches. That’s what I call them. Okay, I’ll start at the beginning. Three weeks ago. It was just an innocent thing, I had no idea. It was a nice day and I was walking through the Brown campus because it’s so scenic, you know, people were sitting around on blankets, and suddenly I see two things. One is a piece of broken glass on the grass—it caught the sun at the right angle, or I wouldn’t have spotted it—and this blond girl in bare feet, walking straight towards it.”

  No one speaks. Dumey races on. “She was by herself, earbuds in her ears, and looked kind of dreamy, you know, she was sure to step on that glass. So—I mean, what would you do?—I went up to her. ‘Woah, miss, see that glass?’ She stopped, took an earbud out and I pointed it out to her. She thanked me and went her way and I went mine.”

  Linebacker harrumphs. “And now you can’t get her out of your mind.”

  Dumey jerks upright in his chair. “I forgot all about her for your information. I see girls all the time and I don’t get obsessed with them! Get that idea out of your head, all right?”

  “Calm down, sir.”

  “Everything went on normally after that, and then a week later I got the Itch. It’s sort of a premonition. Like, when I was a boy, we had a pet garter snake. We went away for the weekend and left the snake in its terrarium. I got a nagging feeling, a sense of dread, that something had happened to it. I couldn’t shake that feeling, and as we drove home it got worse. I ran upstairs to check on it. It had died.

  “That’s what I get about this girl, except it’s ten times worse. It grabs me and shakes me. It’s like the world will end if I don’t get to this location right now! Angell and Elmgrove, not far from my place.”

  “That’s another thing,” Linebacker says. “We’ll need your address and some other information. Background check—”

  “I was watching TV, just relaxing, but I had to throw on jeans and shoes and run out there. And I do mean run, once I got outside.

  “When I got to the corner, everything looked okay. Then I saw it. There was a car coming down Elmgrove toward its T-junction with Angell, too fast and half in the wrong lane. Drunk? I ran up the street. This thing always has me running, I wish it would give me more advance notice. I got a block from Angell, then stepped out in front of the guy and waved with both arms. He swerved and plowed into a stop sign.”

  “What did the driver do?”

  “Don’t know. I wasn’t gonna stick around to find out. Anyway, he was slow to get out of the car. I scrambled away, thinking to get lost in the people milling around the shops on Angell. The first person I saw was—”

  “Ms. Schall.”

  Dumey lets out a breath. “Yes.”

  “So you were meant to save her, be her prince, something like that?”

  “It happened exactly as I told you. She was walking up Angell, and Elmgrove was half a block behind her. Draw your own conclusion.”

  “Already have,” Twin Two mutters behind the desk.

  “How many times has this happened?” Linebacker asks.

  Dumey shudders. He swallows, and his face still glistens. It’s as if he’s sitting in jungle heat, though it’s October outside. “Four, since the glass.”

  “And what were the other three times?”

  Dumey’s squirming in his chair. “Please, please, let’s all go, you’ll see—”

  “Get ahold of yourself, sir.”

  “You’re wasting time.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Dumey, it really is.”

  “Next was a sidewalk cafe, this time on Thayer, and she’d ordered a drink. The Itch hounded me all the way from home, and I don’t have a car. It took
twenty minutes to run all the way there, and I’m all out of shape—I kept stopping, wheezing, gasping, sweating like a pig, then taking off again—I honestly wasn’t sure if she’d still be alive. Get the drink away from her, that’s what I kept thinking. It got louder and louder, ringing in my head. To think of anything else was impossible.

  “Well she was still okay. She was with two girl friends, and they’d all crowded around a small table built for two. The waitress brought the drink as I came up. I walked by her table and ‘accidentally’ tipped it over. Made a mess. I apologized myself hoarse, and bought her another one. The Itch vanished, so I guess everything was okay.

  “I’ve always wondered—was it poisoned, somehow? But after it spilled, she said something about how she shouldn’t have let her friends talk her into ordering alcohol, she’d never cared for it, and asked me to get her a Coke. Maybe that would have led to alcoholism? Something that kills you slowly over your whole life?”

  “Is that so.” Twin Two shifts behind the desk. He puts his feet up on it, then, seeing Linebacker’s face, hastens to remove them.

  “So can I go now?” Dumey’s almost jumping in his chair. “I’ll never go near her again, I swear.”

  Linebacker doesn’t move. “And after that?”

  Dumey seethes. “A week later I diverted her from a safe that fell from a second-story window. A safe! I thought that only happened in cartoons. I ran after her, stopped her and asked her for the time. She gave it to me, then I tried to make small talk. Really just babbling. It didn’t help that a guy was with her, glaring at me the whole time like he was ready to throttle me. The whole time I thought, Why? What’s this all about? Why shouldn’t I let her go on? And then this big, heavy clank sounded and there was the safe on the sidewalk, down the street.”

  “Do tell. Did it fall on anyone else?”

  “No, no, thank God.”

  Twin Two sits up and his fingers pounce on the computer keyboard. A clicking sound starts as he types. “When did this happen? I’ll just verify it—”

  “What difference would that make?” Linebacker snaps. He turns back to the suspect. “And you said there was one more time, Mister—”

  Dumey springs from his chair. “Damn it, man, will you go? She could be dying this moment!”

  The Linebacker jumps nose to nose with him like a drill sergeant. “Sit down. Or I call the cops.”

  The twins tense. Dumey breathes in, out, but remains on his feet.

  Linebacker turns the drill sergeant glare on Twin One. “Put the cuffs on him.”

  “Don’t.” Dumey’s voice comes out deflated.

  Twin One hesitates. “You sure? We’re really not supposed to—”

  “Remember that guy last year?”

  Whatever the guy last year did, it must have been pretty bad, because Twin One shuts right up. He removes the cuffs from his belt, where a nightstick and a can of mace are also holstered, and comes up gingerly, as if approaching a tiger. But Dumey’s posture matches his voice, an inflatable figure with half its air leaked out, and he offers no resistance when the metal clicks around his wrists.

  “And the final time?” Linebacker leans back against the wall by the water cooler, arms folded again.

  Dumey heaves a long sigh. “That was last week. The bus wreck—”

  “The 56?”

  “Yes. She was walking again with her two girl friends, no guy at least. They were across from the State House catching the bus, or on their way to catch it, don’t ask me how I knew, I just knew I had to stop it. The Itch tells me something’s about to happen, but never what I’m supposed to do about it. That’s always for me to figure out on the spot. This time I saw a flyer taped to a telephone pole, left over from some event when they diverted the buses. I stuck it to the bus stop sign, and hoped like hell she wouldn’t come up and read it too close. Fortunately she didn’t. She and her friends walked on, and the bus came and went without them.”

  “Really,” Twin Two says.

  “It goes on and on. I’d never thought about all the ways you can lose your life. There’s no end to them. The driver and six passengers killed—that got to me. I saved Bess—”

  “Ms. Schall, you mean?”

  “Yes, Ms. Schall, I saved her and her friends, too, I guess. But the people on the bus… I couldn’t help them.”

  Silence.

  Dumey sits back. “I’ve wondered a hundred times. Why me? That day with the broken glass… that can’t be the only time something almost happened. Things almost happen to all of us, all the time. Maybe for her, the glass wasn’t meant to be an almost, that was it. But I came along and screwed it up—fate, whatever. So now…”

  “Do you get your ideas from movies?” Linebacker asks.

  “All right, yes, if that makes it any easier to swallow. But why does it always have to be me? I’ve had to change my hours to match hers. She’s a regular night owl! Likes to stay up, you know, college girl and all, she likes her late parties. And what if she gets on a plane that’s going to crash? How am I supposed to stop that? Or if she ended up getting a job far away, like Japan? What am I supposed to do, follow her there? And the Itch…there’s no telling when it’ll hit. Usually in the evening. But the one with the safe, that happened at midday, I had to get up and run out of my job. Had to do some explaining when I got back. I’m having to lie to everyone. Who’d believe the real story? Like how addicts gotta hide their habits from their families, they lie and lie until it becomes automatic, they do it even when they don’t need to. I’m turning into that.

  “Now guys. One last time. You can keep me cuffed here and everything, just send someone two blocks south down this street and see what’s going on.”

  “What is going on?” Twin One asks.

  “I think it’s going to be violent this time. A robbery, a weapon—a knife?”

  “I can go.” Twin Two gets up and moves for the door.

  Linebacker’s glare stops him in his tracks. “Sit down.”

  * * *

  The guards turn to the gathering of information. Dumey’s address, his telephone number. Where he works. Does he have a criminal record? Has a restraining order ever been put out on him? (No to both.) They also send him into the restroom with a plastic cup for a drug test. He blows into a breathalyzer, any alcohol? He says that, like Ms. Schall, he’s never cared for the stuff, not during his Army days of twenty years ago, and not now.

  Linebacker removes the cuffs. He thanks Dumey for his time, apologizes for the inconvenience, and tells him he’s free to go.

  “Now understand, sir, you are required to keep your distance. If you keep following her—”

  “Doesn’t matter now.” Dumey seems to float up out of his chair. His face is a muddle of emotions. He’s no longer tense; he stretches.

  “Guys? I shouldn’t say this. Shouldn’t even think it, but… I feel like I want to thank you. It’s over. I have my life back. I even feel like celebrating, getting a pizza or something. Doesn’t that suck? But it was out of my control. And you shouldn’t feel guilty either, because how could you have believed me? Nobody’s fault, really. Still, it’s such… such an awful tragedy. ”

  He shuffles toward the door, gives them a final wave, and floats out into the night.

  The three guards watch him walk away. As he disappears, a siren wails up. It approaches, shrieking louder, and then stops.

  PAST THE BLACK WHERE CALL THE HORNS

  by Alex Acks

  “Wait!” Mid-stride, Mari slips in sodden leaves and falls face down onto the muddy forest floor. Pain stabs through her nose, the dirt and moldy plants in her mouth making her gag. She chokes, spits. “Wait, dammit!”

  The boy, short and thin, wrapped in a dark green cloak that blends into the forest, catches himself against a tree. He’s as dark as her, has the same close-cut black fuzz of hair, but is far shorter. “Shut up!” he hisses. “You’re going to get me killed. You’re going to get both of us killed!”

  “Then wait and I’l
l be quiet!” She scrambles to her feet, and cool silver and blue vector lines swim into her vision, pointing onward. These visual representations must be conjured by the illegal augment chip nestled in her inferior temporal gyrus, which she does not remember turning on. The question of how this could happen is for the moment less important than the immediacy of the hillside, the edge of green fabric that snaps around the boy’s ankles in the breeze. Ungainly as a floundering airboat, she makes her way up the hill, grabbing at trees while noting stability factors, correcting course to skirt low friction slicks of gray mud. “Who are you?”

  He pauses, head cocked as if listening, and then says: “You can call me Jonah.”

  Of course her sleeping mind would dredge up a name she’d set aside for a someday son when she’d been in Bible study and known she would marry and have a family—the name Brenner had thrown back at her when she’d crushed his dreams of something between them more permanent than sex. With dirt between her teeth, she can find this ghost blackly amusing. “And why are we in the middle of a forest? I don’t even like hiking.”

  His lips curl in a smile far too old for his face. “We’re going to grandmother’s house.”

  It takes her a second longer than it should to get that reference, and she snorts. “Shouldn’t you be wearing red? And be a little girl?”

  “Shouldn’t you be in your spaceship?” he retorts. “It would be a lot faster.”

  “Should you even know about spaceships?” Let alone her ship, the EES Thalassa 7-9.

  He shrugs. “I’m a figment of your imagination. I know whatever you know.”

  For a representation of undirected brain activity, she thinks, he’s quite astute. “Then you should have already known that.”

  “Maybe I did.” He climbs over a rock. “Is your ship a big one?”

  Bemusement drives the conversation now. “Small.” The Thalassa is a pale, smooth stone made to skip across the void with little acknowledgment for human needs, barely big enough for the two-person stellar survey team she heads.

  “Are there many people with you?”