A Time and a Place

by Joe Mahoney

  Rainer stood to greet me. Nothing in his manner betrayed irritation at my tardiness.

  “Good to see you up and about,” he said, pulling a chair out for me.

  Rainer’s staff regarded me from the other side of the table as if I were some unusually intriguing species of bug. Schmitz sat to my left with his arms folded, looking off into space. Only death could have made him appear less interested in the proceedings. Doctor Ramsingh, sitting benignly to my right, smiled at me. I did not smile back. Beyond her, at the foot of the table, sat Sarah. She smiled at me too, and I resisted the urge to tuck in my shirt.

  “Giorgio here was just speculating about the composition of the gate,” Rainer said, indicating an elderly gentleman sitting across the table from me. “What do you think the gate’s made out of, Mr. Wildebear?”

  “How the devil should I know?”

  “Take a guess.”

  I shrugged. “It could be made out of cheese for all I care.”

  Rainer nodded, chuckling. “You just want your nephew back.”

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “Of course not. It’s just that knowing what the gate’s made out of could help us get him back.”

  I could not for the life of me see how. “I cannot for the life of me see how.” I said. “But suppose I give you the benefit of the doubt. What’s it made out of?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “I see. So you’ve asked me here to play games, have you?”

  “Not at all. I asked you here because I have a plan. Something I would like you to be a part of.”

  “A plan. Plan B, I suppose.”

  “You could call it that.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I told you we don’t know what the gate’s made out of and it’s true, we don’t. But it’s only the beginning of what we don’t know. The fact is there’s a whole lot we don’t know, all of which we need to know today.” Rainer leaned toward me. “Mr. Wildebear, I believe that you can control the gate.”

  I nurtured a moment of silence. “Uh huh.”

  “I know you don’t believe it. But I’d like you to try. Maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t, fine. You’ll be free to come and go as you please, you have my word on that. But if it does work, there’s something I want you to do for me.”

  I folded my arms. “What?”

  “I want you to take a team through the gate tomorrow morning and have a little look around.”

  “I see.” I needed to go through the gate to find Ridley. I knew that. I couldn’t rely on anyone else to do it for me. But Rainer and his cronies hadn’t made it easy for me. “And my leg? You expect me to hop through the gate, do you?”

  “I am aware of the problem with your leg. Doctor Ramsingh, what can you tell us about Mr. Wildebear’s leg?”

  I braced myself, afraid that Doctor Ramsingh would tell me the leg required amputation.

  Doctor Ramsingh cleared her throat. “The thing is, ah… there’s no medical reason for your leg to be the way it is.”

  “What?” I spun to face her. “What are you saying? That it’s all in my head?”

  “Sebastian’s scanned it. Physically there’s nothing wrong with your leg.”

  “Can you fix it?” Sarah asked. “That’s what we need to know.”

  Doctor Ramsingh folded her arms. “I’m sorry Miss Frey, but there’s nothing to fix.”

  “We need him walking by the morning, Natasha,” Sarah said. “Do what you can please.”

  “The morning,” Doctor Ramsingh repeated, not sounding particularly optimistic.

  I strove to find adequate expression for the frustration bubbling up inside me. “I can’t even stand on the damned thing. I think you people are responsible and I think you people need to fix it.”

  Schmitz roused himself. “I’ll carry you myself if I have to, Mr. Wildebear.”

  I recoiled at the thought. Schmitz chuckled at my reaction.

  I shook my head in an attempt to shift gears. What did these people want of me? To control the gate? How could they expect me to control the gate? I could barely control a class of fifteen-year old kids. And yet if I wanted to rescue Ridley I knew I had no choice but to go along with Rainer’s plan.

  Some unspoken communication seemed to pass between Sarah and Rainer. Rainer produced an object from his pocket that looked like a wristwatch. It had a leather strap and a snazzy chrome dial.

  “Sebastian,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” Sebastian’s voice came from a tiny speaker on top of the unit.

  “I’m giving you to Mr. Wildebear now.”

  “I can see that,” Sebastian said. “I’m not blind.”

  I accepted the device but refused to strap it around my wrist.

  “Hello, Mr. Wildebear. We’ll be spending a lot of time together, you and I.”

  “Right.” I shoved the device in my pocket.

  “Remember, Barnabus,” Sarah said. “No one’s forcing you to do this. You don’t have to go through with it if you don’t want to.”

  “What—no more drugs in my drink?” I said before I could stop myself.

  Sarah looked at me ruefully. “Just how often would you like me to apologize?”

  “Why don’t I get back to you on that,” I mumbled, getting up from the table so she wouldn’t be able to see my flushed face.

  I hopped out of the dining room with the sensation of everyone’s eyes boring holes in my back.

  It was bad enough that Sebastian had eyes in every room in the house. He didn’t need eyes on my wrist too. When I got back to my room I put him deep inside my underwear drawer, determined not to wear him until I absolutely had to—if and when I found myself on the other side of the gate.

  After a brief nap I was pleasantly surprised to find a pair of crutches outside my door, along with a note from Doctor Ramsingh. If I wasn’t expected to walk very far I could even imagine going through the gate with them. Insofar as I could imagine going through the gate at all. I still couldn’t accept the notion of being able to control the gate. The whole idea seemed about as likely as suddenly knowing how to pilot a helicopter, or speak Pig Latin. And I had not forgotten Fletcher’s fate.

  Looking for a distraction, I set out to find Humphrey’s bag. The doctor had gone to a lot of trouble to ask for it—I figured he must really need it. The last time I’d seen it had been in the den, but it wasn’t there. Thinking one of Rainer’s team must have stashed it somewhere, I made my way downstairs to the cramped basement, planning to search the entire house from the bottom up.

  I found a forty-watt light bulb that needed to be changed, several cobwebs, my washer and dryer sitting outside the laundry room, and Humphrey’s bag sitting on top of the dryer. I also found a deep gouge in the wall beside the laundry room—whoever had moved my appliances had been careless. Yet another indication of Rainer’s lack of regard for me or my property. And how on earth did he expect me to wash my clothes without a functioning washer and dryer?

  I lurched into the laundry room to see what the devil was going on. Instead of bleach and detergent I found my shelves stocked with jars of formaldehyde and other noxious substances. A stainless steel table had taken the place of my appliances. An object of unspeakable horror lay on the table. A mere glimpse of it caused me to start violently, and I backed into a beam jutting from the laundry room ceiling placed there (I am convinced) for no reason other than to knock me unconscious from time to time.

  Darkness.

  I heard someone speaking as though from a great distance. My eyes focussed on the craggy features of one of Rainer’s staff—Giorgio. He was leaning over me with a sharp instrument in his hand. A scalpel, I believe, though I’d never actually seen one before. I eyed the scalpel warily as Giorgio spoke to me in a language I only dimly perceived as English.
/>   “Let me hurt you,” he said.

  Reality shrunk to the size of my laundry room—to madmen armed with scalpels, and stainless steel tables supporting abominations that shouldn’t even exist. I scrambled to get away but kept falling on my side. Try as I might I couldn’t get up, and damned if I could figure out why. The nightmare threatened to end badly when the madman grasped my arm with his empty hand, with a strength that belied his apparent age, and pulled me toward him. I lashed out, trying to ward him off.

  “Easy,” Giorgio said, hauling me to my feet.

  He hadn’t threatened to hurt me at all, I realized—he’d merely offered to help me stand. The blow to my head, his accent, and a growing paranoia on my part had fooled me.

  “I’m sorry. I must’ve hit my head. I—”

  “You need to be more careful, Mr. Wildebear. We can’t afford to lose you.” He peered into each of my eyes. “You’ll be okay, I think.”

  Steadying myself on the steel table, I took a good, hard look at the atrocity that had scared me. I decided it was a dummy, made out of rubber or wax. It had to be. Nothing this grotesque could exist in nature. Humanoid, about the size of large child, its skin ranged from mottled red to pitch black from its head to its toes—or at least, what passed for its toes. Instead of hands and feet the creature’s extremities resembled burnt husks of corn. One of its feet was missing. I reached out to touch the remaining foot.

  “Stop!” Giorgio shouted.

  I jumped at the sound of his voice, and damned if I didn’t almost hit my head again.

  “Please don’t touch poor Mr. Estevez until I examine him,” Giorgio said.

  “Of course. I was just, ah—Mister Estevez? You mean this thing is human?”

  Giorgio nodded. “He has a wife and children back at Ansalar, poor things.”

  I fumbled around for the right thing to say. I had so many questions I didn’t know where to begin. I wanted know what Ansalar was, but it would have to wait—I was more curious about Estevez. “What—happened to him?”

  “What do you think happened? He came through the gate. It shifted, and there he was.”

  “Like that?”

  “Not quite, but he deteriorated rapidly. Mercifully he didn’t live long.”

  Just like Fletcher. “It’s not a reliably healthy process going through the gate, is it?”

  “The gate didn’t do this to him.” Giorgio hesitated, perhaps wondering how much he should reveal. “Necronians did it.”

  “Necronians?”

  “No respect for life, Necronians. Utterly without mercy. They lie in wait for whomever they can get their tentacles on. And when they catch someone? They turn them into this, or worse.”

  “These Necronians. They’re on the other side of the gate, right?”

  “You’d better hope so.”

  “I saw your people carry something horrible out of my house the other day. Something monstrous. Was that a Necronian?”

  Giorgio considered the question. “Could have been. Was it dead?”

  The creature’s single eye had been unblinking. “I think so.”

  “Good.” Giorgio seemed relieved. He picked up Mr. Estevez’s right arm.

  “Hey, I thought you said not to—”

  “Quiet!” Giorgio barked. “Listen.”

  A horrible rasping sound came from the shoulder joint, as if the bone there had been reduced to tiny pellets like peppercorn in a grinder. He let go of the thing. It struck the table with a sharp crack, bouncing briefly before settling. Like a stick. Not at all like an arm.

  I shuddered. “Looks painful.”

  Giorgio didn’t answer. His eyes looked moist. We observed a moment of respectful silence.

  “Could any Necronians make it to this side of the gate alive?” I asked, as the awful prospect occurred to me.

  Giorgio didn’t appear to register the question. “I don’t understand. Mr. Estevez was an engineer at Ansalar. We used to play chess together at lunch.” He looked grimly down at the table, at the creature that had once been human. “What was he doing on the other side of the gate? How did he get there?”

  “Wait a minute. Back up. Where is this Ansalar?”

  Giorgio looked up. He seemed surprised to see me standing there. “What?”

  “Ansalar. Where is it? What is it?”

  “Ansalar’s our base. Here on Earth.”

  “And where was Estevez when he died?”

  “On the other side of the gate.”

  “Where on the other side of the gate? What did it look like?”

  Giorgio thought about that for a second. “Hell,” he said. “It looked like hell, is what it looked like.”

  VII

  Fuzzy

  That night I couldn’t sleep. The sight of poor Mr. Estevez, Giorgio’s talk of Necronians, and the thought of having to go through the gate in the morning had tied my stomach into knots. I wanted to go through the gate—I needed to go through the gate—but how on earth did they expect me to control it? It had no knobs or buttons that I could see. Iugurtha certainly hadn’t used any. How had she done it? Mentally? I had no idea. Unless—

  I sat up straight in bed. Was it as easy as simply visualizing where you wanted to go? I closed my eyes, tried to come up with a destination. Something easy, like the grocery store in Port Kerry. I visualized the front entrance, where Air Cadets often encouraged me to make a donation. I couldn’t properly picture the place—were the exit doors on the left or the right as you entered the store?

  That couldn’t be how the gate worked. If it did, then either we wouldn’t be travelling very far or everything would be really fuzzy when we got there.

  I got up and dug Sebastian out of the underwear drawer. “Sebastian.”

  His voice came out of the air in front of me. Of course—here in the house there was no need to limit himself to the unit in my hand. “Yes, Mr. Wildebear.”

  “How does it work, Sebastian? The gate?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Because you’re not allowed?”

  “I don’t know how it works, exactly.”

  “You have access to all the data, don’t you?”

  “A lot of it’s classified.”

  “You’re not going to be much help to me if you can’t answer my questions.”

  “Try asking the right questions.”

  I took a deep breath. “Who are you people, anyway? Where is Ansalar, exactly?”

  “We’re Casa Terra. Ansalar’s location is a secret. Its origins are shrouded in antiquity.”

  I considered dashing him against the floor with as much violence as I could muster.

  “But you don’t really want to know any of that,” he went on. “What you really want to know is whether you can trust Gordon Rainer. Whether what Sarah Frey has told you is true. What it means that they put you through Mind Snoop with no apparent regard for your well-being. Whether you really need them to help you find Ridley and your doctor friend, and if so, whether they will actually help you.”

  “All of the above.”

  “Gordon Rainer can be trusted once you understand him. Almost everything Miss Frey has told you is true. They put you through Mind Snoop because you were expendable. They have a slightly higher regard for you now that you possess knowledge they require, and can’t access. Yes, I expect you do need them, and no, they will not help you any more than they absolutely have to.”

  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t really. It was too much to process all at once, in the middle of the night. “And you can’t help me with the gate.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I put him back in the drawer, and finally got to sleep.

  But I didn’t sleep well.

  I arrived in Ridley’s room to find it even more crowded than usual, the numbers of those ordinaril
y present augmented by several square-jawed types. If the steely resolve in their eyes was any indication, they would soon be accompanying me through the gate. I fervently hoped we met with better success than Fletcher.

  I found Rainer in quiet dialogue with Doctor Ramsingh, Schmitz, and Giorgio. Rainer’s eyes lit briefly on Sebastian around my wrist and Humphrey’s bag in my hand, but he didn’t comment on them. I glanced at Schmitz, expecting at the very least a sneer, but he ignored me.

  Rainer walked me over to gear piled neatly on the floor next to Sarah’s console. “You’ll need to put these on.”

  I nudged the pile with my foot. It consisted of clothing in various shades of purple, comfortable looking hiking boots, a long black sheath, and a knapsack.

  “Camouflage, provisions, some protection from the elements,” Rainer explained. “Sunglasses, a ration belt, toilet paper, a lighter. That sort of thing. The sheath contains a machete.”

  “A machete?”

  “We anticipate dense undergrowth.”

  On crutches, no less. At least the toilet paper put to rest one of my concerns.

  Rainer left me alone to sort through the gear. Some of the clothing wasn’t exactly intuitive. Trying to put it on while supporting myself with crutches didn’t help. As I was in the middle of some ridiculous posture struggling to put on an absurdly complicated waterproof vest, Sarah Frey walked in. I didn’t actually see her walk in, but I had a pretty good idea she was there because when I straightened up the eyes of every single male in the room were focussed on a single point. I turned around and confirmed my suspicions.

  She made a beeline for me. “You have it on inside out.”

  “I was just —”

  “Don’t feel bad—it’s not exactly obvious.”

  The next thing I knew she was taking the vest off me. I accepted her help wordlessly. I held out my arms as she slipped it back on. Her scent was the kind that, having smelled it once, you never forget.