People still hurried down the streets with the familiar sense of haste common to the city, passing by notices here and there that warned the public against “the Reds.”
“Who are the Reds?” Adam asked Jack.
Jack looked at him strangely. “Do you live under a rock? The Reds are Communists. The United States is at war against them.”
Probably because he realized Adam was still confused, Jack explained as they walked. He likened the war to a game of chess in which a white team and a red team try to wipe each other out and take over the chessboard. The trouble was, each team had equal amounts of brilliant and stubborn players, and it was nearly impossible to win.
“So the red team are the bad guys?” asked Adam.
“Yes,” said Jack, and then he laughed. “Although I suppose they think we’re the bad guys.”
Adam was glad to see Jack smile. But he knew he had to warn Jack about the factory fire soon. The last time he met Jack was in 1967, the exact month and year of the fire. There might only be mere days before the fire. “Listen, Jack, I have to tell you something—”
“We’re here!” Jack interrupted excitedly. They were standing in front of a Midtown movie theater. Jack motioned for Adam to follow, and the pair went inside. Jack snuck a handful of buttery popcorn from an unattended popcorn cart nearby. On the walls were posters advertising the latest movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Adam had seen at school on an old sci-fi channel once when they had an enthusiastic substitute teacher.
Jack glanced at the poster and remarked, “I can’t wait for the future. You’ve heard about how they’re trying to fly people to the moon, haven’t you? Imagine a space mission all the way to Jupiter.” He tugged on his aviator helmet and watched Adam closely with an almost knowing look. “How neat is that? I can’t wait for the new century.”
Adam didn’t mention that he was only two years away from 2001 back home, and it wasn’t anything like the movie yet.
They managed to sneak into one of the showings and glimpse five minutes of a cowboy film set in the Wild West before the movie manager kicked them out. They ran out of the building into the daylight. Even though Adam was normally not a rule breaker and was silently panicking the entire time they were inside the theater, he found himself grinning. They laughed as they hurried down the streets. The sun had come out from behind the clouds and pleasantly warmed their faces.
Jack pointed to a newsstand. “Want some snacks?”
They went up to a seedy-looking newsstand. Rows of magazines, candy cartons, and newspapers crowded the shelves. To the side sat a small pretzel cart. Hunched inside the newsstand, manning both kiosks, was a bald man in a black leather jacket. An eye patch covered half his face, while a pink scar snaked around the other half. Adam guessed he was about thirty years old, though it was hard to tell with grown-ups. The man chewed on a cigar, absorbed in the comics section of the newspaper, chuckling in a low growl every now and then.
“Hi, Charlie,” Jack said to the man.
“Jack,” the man said gruffly.
“I’ll take two pretzels with mustard, please.” Jack held out his empty hand expectantly.
“What, you think I just give away free grub?”
The man and Jack engaged in a glaring contest. Adam took a step backward, his eyes on the vendor’s bulging muscles behind the leather sleeves. Was Jack out of his mind?
“You’re gonna run me outta business,” the man growled after a few seconds, but he retrieved two soft pretzels from the cart. Jack smiled and handed one to Adam.
“How’d you do that?” Adam asked.
The seller waved a hand and said, “Jack’s an insider.”
“I helped Charlie scare away some kids who kept vandalizing his newsstand last month,” Jack explained. “Now he owes me a lifetime supply of pretzels and candy.”
It was a good pretzel—soft and salty, with a generous line of mustard along the top. Mustard always made Adam’s lips burn, but he loved it nonetheless. He thought of Francine and how she and her friends would share mustard-laden pretzels on their birthdays. How peculiar that they could’ve done the exact same thing, in the exact same city, decades apart.
Jack finished his in four bites. “Best pretzel in the whole city,” he said with his mouth full.
“My uncle makes good pretzels,” said Adam. “He runs a bakery.”
“What’s it called?”
“The Biscuit Basket,” said Adam before he caught himself. He added, “It’s not going to be open for, uh, a while.”
Jack found this oddly funny and snorted in laughter. He helped himself to a piece of bubble gum from the newsstand, which made Charlie snarl, “Shouldn’t you be in school? It’s Tuesday.”
Jack admitted he was skipping class.
“Ya gotta stop this, Jack,” replied Charlie.
“Won’t your dad be mad?” chimed in Adam.
Jack gave him a hard look. “My dad’s gone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about? He died in the factory fire. I live with my aunt and uncle now, a few towns over.”
Adam backtracked. “The…fire?”
Jack chewed on the bubble gum, looking disappointed. “You really aren’t from the future then, are you?”
Charlie gave the boys an odd look as Adam felt himself turn pale. “Why would you say that?” Adam asked.
Jack looked away. “Just an observation.”
Adam swallowed hard. “You—you told me at the cemetery that your grandpa and his friends had fantastical ideas about time and magic…”
“Yeah. My grandpa used to study the properties of time.” Jack stopped chewing the gum as his expression grew serious. “His friends—followers—once told me there’s a high probability that time traveling exists, and that I should watch for signs. For strange events. People showing up and then disappearing, for instance.” Jack looked pointedly at Adam. “I’ve always been keeping a lookout for that kind of thing. But I didn’t believe them, not completely. Because if time traveling exists, why do bad things still happen? Shouldn’t someone be warning us each time disaster’s going to strike?”
“There’d be too many to keep track of,” grunted Charlie.
Adam said nothing. It was the very question he’d been wondering too. He held his snow globe tighter and glanced at the newspaper stand. The print date on the front page of the papers read:
AUGUST 13, 1968
Nearly a year after the candle factory burned down.
No wonder Jack seemed a little different from the first time Adam had met him. Adam had dealt with his own loss by retreating into a shell; Jack, by skipping school and acting out.
Charlie helped himself to one of his own pretzels and growled, “Your grandpa sounds like he had some interesting ideas, Jack.”
Jack shrugged. “He and his friends believed there are three pieces of time on earth—past, present, and future. And that there’s a way to control them.” He stopped talking after noticing Adam’s expression. “You okay?”
“How?” asked Adam, who was only half listening. His mind was still on the factory. It burned down a year ago.
“He said that long ago, the pieces were trapped in containers. If you were lucky enough to find one of them, you could use it to unleash that piece of time’s power.” Jack shook his head. “A lot of people thought my grandpa was cuckoo. Even my dad didn’t listen to him. They called him Elbert the Eccentric.” Jack’s grin faded as he kicked at the sidewalk. “At least he got a proper burial. The people who died at the factory…that was their grave. My dad included.”
“Candlewick’s Candles,” Charlie said with a sigh. “Horrible accident. Story made it to all the papers here. Can’t imagine the nightmare those workers went through. All those safety violations they found afterward…How’d the owner get away with all that?”
“I think he was controlling them,” answered Jack. “That’s my guess.”
Adam suddenly felt li
ghtheaded, the way he did when a teacher called on him and he had to speak in front of the whole class.
“He was,” he said hoarsely.
“What?” asked Jack.
“Robert Baron the Third. The Gold Mold. He used his pendulum to hypnotize people. I mean, his father did, but I’m sure he did too.”
“You—you met my dad’s boss?”
Adam didn’t answer. He didn’t understand why the snow globe had brought him to this place, one year after the factory fire. How could he warn Jack now, after the fire had already happened? Nor did he understand why he met the Barons forty-five years before the fire. The visits must be connected, yet the connection wasn’t clear.
“Charlie, you got any water back there?” said Jack. “Adam looks like he’s about to pass out.”
Adam heard Charlie mutter something about annoying kids driving him out of business, which made Jack laugh and say, “Charlie, you’ll be here forever.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Probably.” He gave Adam a look of concern before disappearing to rummage behind the window. Jack stood on his tiptoes and leaned over the sill to help.
Meanwhile, Adam started to put down the snow globe and half-eaten pretzel so he could rub his eyes. As he did so, the snow globe tilted, and the snowflake confetti whirled inside the glass.
“Wait!” he shouted, realizing too late that the cemetery inside the glass had disappeared.
The next moment, he was standing in his bedroom again.
He kept shaking the snow globe. “Take me back!” he cried in exasperation.
His exclamation woke his uncle. “Adam?” called Uncle Henry in a groggy voice from the living room. “What’s going on?”
Adam noticed the time on his bedside clock. It was almost midnight, the same time he had left.
“Nothing,” he answered. “Just a bad dream is all.”
On Friday after school, Adam headed for the subway.
Ever since Adam moved to his uncle’s place from the suburbs after his parents died, Uncle Henry had reminded him about the rules of traveling alone in the city:
1. Say where you’re going and when you’ll be home.
2. Don’t talk to strangers.
3. If you ever feel unsafe, go into the nearest store and find a trusted adult.
4. Avoid unlit areas.
Now that Adam was twelve (a perfectly adequate age, despite what Daisy’s mother thought), he was venturing to more places on his own, though Uncle Henry preferred him to stay within twenty blocks of home. Anywhere north of Times Square or across a river still worried his uncle, as it was “too far.” So Adam hadn’t bothered much with going anywhere on the subway—until now.
He’d been working up the courage for a few days and was now determined to find Charlie. The vendor was the one person who could tell him where he might be able to find Jack. And if he found Jack, maybe he could learn more about the fire and Jack’s grandfather’s theories about time. Adam had memorized the Midtown cross streets where the vendor’s newsstand had been situated: 57th and 6th Avenue, not far from Central Park. He could only hope it was still there. He knew that thirty-one years had passed, and the probability was slim, almost impossible. But then again, many impossible things had happened in the past week.
As Adam squeezed past legs and ducked under arms inside the train car, he decided his uncle had forgotten to mention one more rule.
5. Avoid the subway during rush hour, or else you’ll get squished like a sandwich.
Adam spent twenty minutes being shoved and jostled before he finally reached his stop. He hurried outside and gulped in the fresh, early evening air. Then he headed down the street where Charlie’s newsstand had been thirty-one years ago.
To his great surprise—or, rather, he wasn’t too surprised, because nothing was surprising these days anymore—the newsstand was still there. And sure enough, hunched behind the window was Charlie, eye patch and cigar and all, looking three decades older. This time, the bald vendor wore a gray windbreaker instead of a leather jacket, and deep lines creased his forehead as he read the newspaper.
Adam timidly approached the man. He had to clear his throat and say hello several times before Charlie heard him.
“Speak up, will ya?” Charlie put down the newspaper and peered over the window. “Whaddya want?”
“You’re—you’re Charlie, right?” Adam explained how he was looking for someone who’d visited Charlie’s newsstand as a kid. “It’s this boy, Jack. He wore an aviator helmet. You knew him thirty-one years ago…” He trailed off after seeing no change in Charlie’s clueless look.
Charlie squinted his one eye. “What’s your name again?”
“I’m…um…you don’t know me.”
Charlie suddenly let out a shout of recognition. “You’re that kid who disappeared into thin air!”
Several passersby glanced back at the exclamation. Adam stuffed his fists into his jacket, embarrassed.
Charlie had turned pale. His cigar dropped out of his mouth. “I remember you,” he said shakily. “Scared the living daylights out of me and your friend after you pulled that magic act. My wife wouldn’t believe me when I told her. Thought I was tryin’ to be funny. You some sort of ghost, boy?”
Adam shook his head. “So do you remember Jack?”
“That was a long time ago. Haven’t seen ol’ Jack in ages.”
Adam’s heart fell. “Thank you anyway.”
Back at the newsstand, Charlie scratched his head. How odd that the vanishing boy had appeared at his newsstand after so many years. The boy didn’t look any older either, if his memory was correct. Then again, most kids looked the same to the vendor: delinquents who wrecked his property and swiped candy and magazines.
Charlie chewed on his cigar. He probably should’ve told the boy about the stranger who had approached the newsstand a few months ago. The street vendor vividly remembered the man. An uneasy feeling crept up his neck even as he recalled the incident.
The stranger had worn a black suit and had two sharp eyebrows and a pointy chin. He’d arrived at the counter early one morning in late July, clutching a spiral notepad in his long fingers. Charlie remembered thinking the stranger probably needed to see a doctor—he had sickly pale skin, paler than any he’d seen, and a sort of crazed look in his black eyes.
“Are you Charlie?” the stranger had hissed softly.
“Yep. What can I get for ya?”
The stranger flipped to a page in his notepad. “In August of 1968, you and another eyewitness saw a boy vanish into thin air from this very spot. Is this correct?”
Charlie had to consider this for a few moments before he remembered. “Oh, yeah. Thought I imagined it. Scared the heck out of me. Probably a kid magician.”
The stranger’s dark eyes had glinted in the sunlight. “What was his name?”
“How should I know? I ain’t the kid’s babysitter.”
“Can you describe the boy? Dark hair, gray eyes, short, perhaps?”
“You’re asking me about some random kid I met thirty-one years ago?”
“Not every kid vanishes into thin air,” replied the stranger pointedly.
“I don’t answer questions, I sell stuff.”
“I should warn you, it’s best to cooperate.”
“Who even are you?”
The stranger’s thin lips curled into a sneer. “Ah-ah. I’m asking the questions here, and I suggest you answer them. Think of your poor wife.”
Charlie stiffened.
“It’s not easy for you two to make ends meet, is it?” continued the stranger. “Struggling to retire with barely any savings. Imagine what would happen if you ended up losing this newsstand.”
“Are you threatening me?” Charlie demanded, cracking his knuckles. No skinny, pale man in a suit intimidated him. But the stranger didn’t even flinch.
“Try to remember.” The stranger’s eyes flicked over the bootlegged CDs on the stand. “Or else I’ll let the authorities know about your il
legal goods…”
Charlie fumed, but the thought of his wife stopped him from climbing over the window to pummel the smirk right off the guy’s pointy face.
“All I remember is the kid was small,” said Charlie. “Looked eight or nine or so. Might’ve had dark hair.”
“And his home? Where was he from?”
“I assume he’s from the city, Your Royal Inquisitor,” Charlie growled.
“Try to remember any additional details.”
“That’s all I got. How about you scram?”
The stranger simply sneered and eyed the CDs again.
Charlie closed his eyes and racked his brain. He could make up something, but he had a feeling the stranger would catch on if he told anything less than the truth. As a matter of fact, he did remember a bit about the boy. As the stranger had pointed out, it wasn’t every day that he met someone who vanished into thin air.
“Think the kid mentioned at one point he worked at a bakery or whatnot,” the vendor finally said. “The name was funny. Two words, both started with the same letter, if I recall.”
“A bakery that had a funny name,” spat the stranger, as if Charlie was making fun of him.
“Hey, bud, you should be glad I remembered that much. Now how ’bout you tell me your name?”
“That is none of your concern,” the stranger answered before slipping away. In a few seconds, he had disappeared around the corner.
The day after the stranger had shown up, the newsstand had a brand-new sign: NO SOLICITING.
Now Charlie thought about the boy again.
“Eh, it’s probably nothing,” he muttered, flipping the page in the newspaper. “Lousy New Yorkers.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE MATHEMATICIAN
Adam had guessed the venomous M would return one day. Although he hadn’t seen the man in a while—and he continued to keep a close lookout each day, walking to school and back—he was certain they would cross paths again.
He was right.
It didn’t happen right away. The core of winter was approaching. Schools closed for Thanksgiving break, and the windows of department stores displayed their arrays of winter hats and wool jackets. Every few days, flurries of fat snowflakes filled the city streets, but they didn’t stay on the ground for long. The real snowstorms lurked in the distance, unformed clouds of ice and gloom yet to come.
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