by Joe Mahoney
“Remember the rules,” I admonished.
“There may have been a few accidents here and there,” Jacques conceded. “Not that it matters. The T’Klee are a vile species. An affront to nature. The less of them in the universe the better.”
“What? Come on. What could you have against such simple creatures?”
“Simple? They’re almost as technologically advanced as I am. And quite a bit more advanced than your primitive species.”
I was thoroughly confused. Were we talking about the same race?
“The T’Klee on this planet are but children,” Jacques explained. “Elsewhere they are fully grown, and capable of more damage than you can possibly imagine.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying there are more T’Klee out there somewhere?”
“Quite a few of the despicable creatures, unfortunately.”
“With advanced technology?”
I could see by the look in Jacques’ eye that it was true, and that Jacques didn’t like it. I had seen one of these other T’Klee before, I realized—in Ansalar. Evidently they were allied with Casa Terra somehow. I would have to ask Rainer about that, if—when—I got out of here.
“I will give credit where credit is due,” Jacques said. “Once upon a time the T’Klee, as you call them, had wonderful technology, some of it their own, some of it not. But they weren’t very good at sharing. I think they hid something that I am looking for here. Tell me, Wildebear Barnabus J., where did you find this quantum portal of yours?”
If what Jacques was saying was true, then the T’Klee on this planet were a splinter group. A lost colony, perhaps, forgotten about by their more technologically advanced cousins, living for hundreds of years (if not more) in ignorance of the rest of universe, oblivious to the existence of their cousins and their wars.
“You mean to say you’re here on a treasure hunt? Holding the citizens of this planet hostage until you find what you’re looking for? What will you do if you don’t find it?”
Jacques stared at me dolefully with its lone eye. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” it said. It may even have meant it. “But this is taking too long.” There was an edge to its voice that didn’t promise good things.
I was instantly on my guard. “Too long for what?”
“To learn what you know.” Jacques produced the slender wand from behind its back. It wrapped the wand in one of its thick tentacles and waved it rhythmically back and forth in front of my face. Tiny green sparkles of light drifted off the tip of the wand into the darkness beyond.
“I don’t know anything,” I told the Necronian, bracing myself for pain.
“You know that much, at least,” Jacques observed.
If I could survive Mind Snoop, I could survive anything, I told myself, though I didn’t really believe it. Jacques touched me gently on the forehead with the wand. My brain exploded into a billion shards of pain. Against which, I discovered, there was no bracing oneself.
XVIII
No Place Like Home
The house was dark, and had a musty smell to it. It creaked the way one-hundred-year-old houses do. From the hall, the grandfather clock ticked loudly. Beside me on the lamp table sat a half-empty bottle of Lagavulin. A large, ornate book sat beside the bottle, and alongside the book a glass, mostly empty, though I didn’t remember drinking from it.
I clutched at a wisp of dream. Of a frightening creature half submerged in a pool of guck. Of a man slapping me, shouting at me to take something from him. I didn’t care what the man wanted. I knew only that I wanted away from there. Willing myself someplace, anyplace else, I spoke a name, uttered a powerful invocation of another time, another place.
And awoke in my den, sprawled across my easy chair, trying to remember how I got there. Waking up in the den was not unusual. I frequently fell asleep reading in there. But although a book sat on the table beside me, I did not remember reading from it.
“Some dream,” I said aloud, relieved to discover that the dream had been just that, a dream. Still, a growing unease nibbled at the edges of my consciousness.
Something clattered against the den window and I jumped, but it was just a tree branch in the wind. I turned on the lamp and groaned my way out of the chair, thinking a shower would help clear my befuddled mind and wash away the lime-green goo coating my body.
Halfway out of the chair it occurred to me to wonder about the goo. It wasn’t every day one woke up covered head to toe in lime-green goo. I sat back down and inspected myself. It was as though I’d been dipped in a vat of the stuff. By now it was all over my easy chair and the floor. I held a hand up. The goo oozed slowly between my fingers, dripping onto the floor in tear-shaped globules.
My watch spoke. “Mr. Wildebear,” it said.
This was odd, considering I didn’t own a watch.
Given my proximity to a half-empty bottle of scotch I could credibly dismiss the talking watch as an auditory hallucination. The goo was not so easy to explain away, but there were other ways of dealing with that. I got up and started for the shower again.
“Mr. Wildebear,” the watch said again.
I sat back down. There was no question about it. The watch on my wrist was talking to me.
“Hello—what have we here?”
“Mr. Wildebear, you’re probably a little disoriented right now. I thought you’d like to know that your memory will return in a few moments. Unfortunately, when it returns you’ll recall several unpleasant things. I’m sorry to have to tell you that an interrogation conducted during a brief period of captivity has damaged your brain. Fortunately, the interrogation was interrupted before it went very far.”
“Huh.” If I understood correctly, the watch was telling me that I had brain damage. This went a long way toward explaining why I thought a watch was talking to me. “But it’s temporary, this damage? My memory will return?”
“Absolutely. You will almost completely recover, for the most part.”
I frowned. “For the most part?”
“You may continue to experience a few memory lapses here and there. But I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you. You’re almost forty years old—your memory has already begun to deteriorate as a natural consequence of aging. This has merely accelerated the process a little.”
“A little?”
“I would estimate that your memory remains every bit as sharp as that of a healthy seventy-two-year-old.”
“A healthy seventy-two-year-old?” I exclaimed.
Naturally I did not want to believe what the watch was telling me. But bits of the dream were coming back to me now in sufficient detail that I was forced to concede that at least some of what the watch was telling me was true.
“Sebastian,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Wildebear.”
“I’m starting to remember.”
“Good.”
“What an ass you can be.”
“Now, Mr. Wildebear—”
“The others.” Their names were on the tip of my tongue. “Tell me. Where are they now?”
“Mr. Schmitz was never captured. The gate deposited him someplace safe. Because he’s immune to the Necronians’ charms, he was able to infiltrate the compound with relative ease, free Mr. Rainer, and steal the gate back. Afterward they freed you. Unfortunately, once free, you fled with the gate, leaving both Mr. Schmitz and Mr. Rainer behind on C’Mell, though not before Mr. Schmitz strapped me onto you, as he knew he must.”
“Why would I do such a thing?”
“You were delirious. You didn’t know what you were doing. Mr. Schmitz could not fully revive you. Half conscious, your instincts kicked in and you transported yourself to safety without them.”
I was appalled. I recalled not liking either man. Still, never in a thousand years would I have deliberately stranded anyone on a hostile alien planet. “What a thing to do,” I whispere
d.
“They were prepared,” Sebastian said. “They had a plan. And they can look after themselves.”
“They’re in terrible danger,” I said as the better part of my memory came flooding back, in particular my conversation with the alien monster, whose name, I seemed to recall, was Jacques. Except that couldn’t possibly be true. Briefly I contemplated the possibility that I really had suffered brain damage.
“The Necronians are holding the T’Klee hostage until they find what they’re looking for,” I said. “There’s no telling what they’ll do if they don’t get what they want.” I imagined the Necronians gassing the entire planet, or destroying it utterly with some sinister technology.
I needed to get Schmitz and Rainer off that planet. I needed to get Ridley off that planet. But Ridley didn’t want saving. What if I couldn’t get him to come back with me? What about everyone else? Would I have to save them too? The idea was absurd. How could one man save an entire planet? I couldn’t even save one sister.
“You know, don’t you,” I said to Sebastian. “What’s going to happen to them all.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wildebear. Once we return to our present I will have exhausted my knowledge of the future.”
“Return to our present? You mean this isn’t—”
“It’s four years before our subjective present.”
A few days into summer vacation I had rearranged the furniture. Surveying the den now, I saw that the china cabinet had returned to the far wall, and the couch and easy chair had reverted to their original positions. The house was awfully quiet, too, with no sign of Casa Terra.
“Your people—”
“Casa Terra is not aware of either your existence or mine in this time,” Sebastian said.
No Casa Terra to harass me. That was something, at least. But why had I transported myself to the past? Because I thought I would be safe here? Was it even my doing? The gate was an extremely sophisticated piece of machinery. Was it depositing me where it thought I needed to be? Had it been doing so all along?
I couldn’t stay here. The Barnabus J. Wildebear from this time was probably upstairs asleep mere feet from where I sat. And the fact that I could flit through time did not grant me license to sit around doing nothing. The gate was fickle, unpredictable. For all I knew every instant spent loafing about in the past drew Ridley and the rest ever closer to some dire fate in the future.
But instead of leaping into action I did exactly the opposite—I fell asleep. My only defence—pretty feeble considering everything at stake—was that I was bone-tired. My cold had progressed from my nose to my chest and I believe I had a fever.
When I awoke, it was with a racking cough and a sore back and a ringing in my ears.
I turned to my side in the easy chair, attempting to get comfortable, when it dawned on me that the ringing wasn’t inside my head. It was off to my right, in the general vicinity of the lamp table and the… phone.
I sat up and studied the device, a beige, bulky affair, too big for the table really. In about two years I would replace it. The fact that it hadn’t been answered yet suggested that the Wildebear from this time was not asleep upstairs (I often went camping this time of year). It was the middle of the night. No one ever called me in the middle of the night. It was, therefore, a wrong number. I settled back in the easy chair and closed my eyes.
“You’ll want to answer that,” Sebastian said.
“Why?” I mumbled, already half asleep.
“It’s Jerry Doucette.”
“Jerry?” I roused myself. “But Jerry’s—”
I didn’t finish the thought. Sebastian would know perfectly well who Jerry Doucette was, and what. My brother-in-law. My sister’s husband. The father of my nephew. The proprietor of a successful music store in St. Eleanors, and alive and well, in this time at least—something that had changed abruptly about two years before my sister’s death.
Jerry used to play folk music every Thursday night at a pub in Port Kerry called The Triangle. After one gig he slipped out the back door of the pub never to be seen again. The police found his motorcycle parked halfway down the block but they never found Jerry. According to his friends, Jerry had had a few that night, and although Katerina might have begged to differ, Jerry did possess a modicum of common sense. He knew better than to drink and drive.
There’s a good chance that he had intended to sleep the evening’s excesses off at my place. The phone company had records indicating that he had called my place in the wee hours of the morning. But I had been away at the time and had not answered. Jerry knew my house wasn’t far away through the woods. He knew also that I didn’t lock my doors in those days (I only started doing that after returning home one day shortly after Jerry’s disappearance to find a bizarre lime-green goo all over my den, an act of vandalism I had attributed to local teenagers).
If Jerry really had intended to spend the night at my place he never made it. He might have got lost in the woods, or fallen off a cliff and been swept out to sea. He might have been robbed and left to rot in some secret lair, or been abducted by aliens, or vanished in a puff of smoke. Whatever the case, no trace of the man had ever been found, though an impressive array of family, friends, and volunteers had spent days scouring the woods around Port Kerry.
The phone rang some more.
And suddenly I had a pretty good idea what had happened to Jerry.
“What day is this?” I asked Sebastian.
“Friday, August the fifth.”
“It’s the night Jerry disappears, isn’t it?”
“On the contrary,” Sebastian said. “It’s the night you find him.”
I didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t need to. I just opened up the gate. Immediately I felt much better than I had seconds before.
I took a closer look at Jerry, barely visible in the gloom of night, lying against the trunk of an enormous tree. Earlier, seeing it in the dark, I had mistaken that tree for one of the giant specimens native to C’Mell. Pulling the gate back allowed for a wider perspective. I saw now that the tree was terrestrial in origin, a giant oak overlooking a small pond. It was Skinner’s Pond, I realized, a secluded swimming hole located not far from Port Kerry. I knew it well, having swum there often as a kid.
Jerry had been smoking the last time I’d seen him through the gate. Now, instead of a cigarette, he held a cell phone in his hand. As I watched, he lowered the cell phone from his ear and seemed to sigh. Beside me in the house the phone stopped ringing. Jerry carefully adjusted his position, his face a study in pain, his right leg twisted unnaturally below the knee.
It was easy enough to glean what must have happened. The pond sat at the base of an escarpment just high enough to be treacherous. Making his way through the woods in the dark with little more than a red nose to light his way, Jerry must have veered off the path. A few steps in the wrong direction and he would have tumbled right off the edge of the cliff. His leg looked pretty banged up. There was no telling what other injuries he might have suffered. The sooner I got him to a hospital the better.
I forced myself to my feet, picked up my knapsack, and staggered down the hall to the kitchen. On the way I caught a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror. Gobs of green goo clung to me, reinforcing a general feeling of filth and malaise. I desperately craved a shower and a change of clothes. But I couldn’t take a shower with Jerry lying battered and broken in the middle of the woods.
In the kitchen I found an old black flashlight in the second drawer down along with a first aid kit. The dribble of light the flashlight produced would have elicited a derisive snicker from a birthday candle but it would have to do.
I placed the gate well behind Jerry in the forest, not wanting to startle him. The gate cooperated, depositing me exactly where I wanted to go, which was great, except that I was starting to have mixed feelings about this enterprise.
I was thinking that the past was immutable. In the present, Jerry had been missing for four years. That he had gone missing because I was about to take him somewhere through the gate was obvious. I intended to make a beeline for a hospital in this, Jerry’s own time, but I had a pretty good idea that the gate wouldn’t allow it. During our search for him Jerry had not turned up in any hospitals—I know because at Katerina’s behest I had phoned every hospital within five hundred kilometres. But if I wasn’t about to take Jerry to a hospital, then where was I about to take him?
Whatever happened next he was going to go missing. I couldn’t change that any more than I could bring Katerina back to life. If he was going to vanish from the face of the Earth, it was probably better by my hands than, say, the maw of a bear. Whatever happened, it was good to know that he was still alive, though the knowledge that he would never again see Katerina grieved me.
I turned on the flashlight and stepped out of the gate. Wind buffeted me with impish gusts. I retrieved the book from where it lay near a bed of bulrushes and picked my way carefully around rustling trees to Jerry’s side. On the way I scratched my face on an overhanging branch; had it not been for the flashlight I might have poked an eye out. I found Jerry slumped against the trunk of the tree with his eyes closed.
“Jerry. Jerry, can you hear me?”
He opened his eyes. He was breathing and his colour seemed okay.
“You’re going to be all right. I’m going to get you out of here.”
“Barney—Barney, thank God. Have you seen my guitar?”
“Jerry, your leg—”
“Never mind my leg. My Taylor. Where is it?” He craned his neck, looking around.
I arced the flashlight beam around until it lit on a black road case festooned with bumper stickers. I retrieved it. Jerry unlatched it and conducted a brief but thorough inspection of his Taylor acoustic guitar while I held the flashlight over it. Afterward he closed the case and leaned back wearily against the tree. “Thank God.”
“Jerry, I’m going to—”
