Watcher in the Woods

by Robert Liparulo

“I’m sorry,” he said.

  David looked at the floor. “You can try not to be mean, you know.”

  “I’ll try.” Xander punched him gently in the shoulder, on the uninjured side.

  David stomped him on the foot and ran down the hall, laughing.

  Over the next half hour, David, Xander, and Dad carried boxes up to the room. Toria followed them with a notepad. As they thought of things they needed, they called them out to her: bulletin boards, index cards, dry-erase board markers, pushpins, Sharpie markers in different colors, binders, a first aid kit.

  Xander thought the computer needed upgrading. “For sure a bigger hard drive and flat-screen monitor,” he said. “Maybe two screens.”

  David thought it would be cool to link the notes they would make about each world with possible connections to other worlds or things. He imagined an index card about his time in the French village during WWII linking somehow—he didn’t know how yet—to Xander’s adventure in the Colosseum.

  He asked Toria to add colored string to the list.

  Dad dug into the boxes from his days as a teacher and found a time line of all the major events in history. Only a foot tall, it ran some thirty feet long. He mounted it high up along two walls in the mission control center—or MCC, as they were already calling it.

  To David, it was the coolest thing so far. After all, the portals apparently were doorways into the past. That got him thinking. He said, “Dad, do the portals ever take you to the future?”

  “Not that I’ve seen, Dae,” Dad said, rummaging through a box. They were all in the old servants’ quarters now, cleaning, unpacking, setting things up.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with the laws of time travel, or . . .” He shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “There was that antechamber with things that looked like they were for space travel,” Xander said. “Remember, Dae?”

  David nodded. “But people do that now,” he said.

  “Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969,” Dad reminded them.

  “The moon?”

  The way Xander said it made David’s stomach squirm. Dad scowled at Xander and pointed a finger at him. “Stay away from the rooms with space stuff. At least for now.”

  “Well, the portals do take you to different times and places,” Xander said. “We’ll need a big wall map of the world.”

  “I think I have one,” Dad said.

  “My string-connection idea is gonna work perfect,” David said.

  As they became more involved in the task, ideas for making it more useful struck each of them like beads of water in a storm.

  Xander said he would draw up a large chart of the hallway and antechambers. They would write down the items they found in each and keep doing it as the rooms shifted and the items changed. “Maybe there’s a pattern to the way they move around that we haven’t noticed yet,” he said.

  “We can link your lists of items to the worlds they lead to, to the map and time line,” David said.

  Dad added, “So we’ll have links from rooms to items, to historical times, to geographic locations.” His grin stretched wide, and he nodded. “This is gonna work. I know it.”

  David caught his excitement. He said, “Whatever’s happening, whoever’s behind it—they haven’t seen anything like us before.”

  “We’ll take ’em by storm,” Xander said. “We’ll be Bruce Willis in Die Hard.”

  David added, “Aragorn in Lord of the Rings.”

  “Aragorn?” Xander said. “No, no . . . Legolas.”

  “You’re both wrong,” Dad said. “Gandalf!”

  “I know,” David said. “Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator!”

  Xander’s eyes got big. In his best deep voice, he said, “I’ll be back,” and ran out the door.

  CHAPTER twenty - nine

  MONDAY, 5 : 59 P . M .

  They listened to Xander’s footsteps pounding down the hall—toward their bedroom, David thought. But in that house you could never be sure where any sound came from. It was unsettling, like detecting the faint smell of smoke without ever finding out what was causing it.

  Toria said, “Dad, did you say flip chart?” She was consulting her list, tapping it with the tip of a mechanical pencil.

  “And a stand for it,” Dad agreed. “It’s like a big tripod.”

  “For what?” David asked.

  “Rules. We’ll start a list and refine them as we learn more.”

  David wrinkled his nose. “Rules? Like what?”

  Dad came off the step stool he had been using to reach the time line and smooth out a section. He sat down on the stool. “I’ve been thinking about this.” He held up two fingers. “Two kinds of rules: one are things that we impose on ourselves for safety and to learn the most about the worlds.”

  “Like the buddy system?” David asked.

  “And that we always debrief within an hour of coming back from a world.”

  “Debrief ? What’s that?”

  “It’s sharing everything you learned from a mission—writing about it, talking about it—so you and others can learn from it. If we do it right away, we won’t forget anything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Take your trip yesterday to World War II. I’m sure there are things you’ve already forgotten: what people looked like, any signs that you saw, exactly what you did and the order in which you did it.”

  David shook his head. “How would any of that help?”

  “Until we know what we’re dealing with, anything could help. What if we realize that we’re seeing the same people in different worlds?” He gave David a look that said, Yeah, huh? What about that?

  David felt something in his head pull painfully tight, like getting a charley horse, but in his mind. He said, “The same people in different worlds? You mean like us?”

  “Travelers like we are, maybe . . . or not.” He looked at David’s bewildered face. “Never mind. What I’m saying is, we just don’t know what we’ll learn once we start recording our experiences, comparing them to each other. That’s what debriefing will let us do.”

  David sat on the floor and leaned his back against the wall. “And debriefing is a rule?”

  “Well, yes. It’s SO P—standard operating procedure. Rules that we implement to help us reach our goal and keep us all on the same page. Like the rule that we never talk about what we’re doing here to anyone else. And not to each other in public. And never over the phone. Things like that.” He stood and started to pace. “I can think of dozens. We need to write them down and all agree to them.”

  “Okay,” David said, letting out a weak laugh. “I get it. Lots of rules.”

  “Those are just our rules,” Dad said. “Then there are the rules of the worlds, the time ripple or whatever it is.” He looked at the room around him. “The house.”

  “The house has rules?” David said.

  “The same way everything does,” Dad said. “Like the rules of gravity and physics.” He leaned over and touched David’s bruised cheek. “You cut yourself, you bleed, right?”

  “The house doesn’t bleed.”

  Dad raised his eyebrows. “As far as we know. But it does do weird things with sound, right? And it doesn’t like to have the doors upstairs locked. The antechamber won’t change as long as someone’s in it or in the world beyond. These are all ‘rules,’ and I’ll bet there are many more we don’t even know about yet. We need to make a list of them so we know what we’re dealing with, what we can do and what we can’t do. Maybe we’ll see a pattern that will help us figure this whole thing out.”

  Dad paced to the end of the room, turned, and came back. “And I think we should try to understand the reason for each rule in the first place.”

  David lowered his face into his hands. “You’re making my head hurt.”

  “No, Dae, this is good. For example, why can’t you bring a camcorder into another world and film your time there?”

  D
avid thought about Xander’s camcorder that had dangled around his neck the entire time he was playing keep-away from hungry tigers. When he’d come back, all that had been recorded was static. He said, “How are we supposed to find out why the camera didn’t work?”

  Dad spread out his hands. ”I don’t know! But that’s part of what we’re doing here, part of what this room, the MCC, is all about, right? Figuring stuff out, maybe even conducting experiments to learn more.”

  David frowned. “Experiments” made him think of science class and failing more times than succeeding. He was already trying to get his head around “rules”—two sets of them!—and the very idea that this control center was an attempt to understand something that to David was not understandable: you’ve got a house with doorways to other times and places, people from those places who can step through and take your mom, and doors that can apparently shake off the locks you put on them—how could you understand any of that?

  Dad started tapping his chin, thinking. He said, “Let’s get a big wall calendar too. We can—”

  “How do you spell calendar?” Toria asked.

  Dad told her, then continued: “It’ll help us keep track of what we’ve already done, how long everything takes to do.”

  “Like what?” David said.

  “Like . . .” Dad thought for a moment. “Like we came to Pinedale on August 13. We found this house the next day.”

  Because you knew about it before we even started looking, David thought. Instead of rubbing it in, he said, “And we moved in a few days later.”

  “Right,” Dad agreed. “The seventeenth. Last Wednesday.”

  “Just last Wednesday,” David repeated to himself. He could not believe how much had happened since then. It felt like months.

  Dad said, “And three days later, yesterday—” He stopped.

  David finished for him: “Yesterday morning is when Mom got kidnapped.”

  Dad shook his head. “So quickly . . .”

  Xander rushed into the room, out of breath and holding an armful of white tubes. David recognized them as rolled movie posters.

  “Check it out,” Xander said. He dropped the posters on the floor and selected one, then smoothed it open against a bare spot of wall. It displayed a fierce warrior flexing his torso and arms of rippling muscles, gritting his teeth and obviously ready to fight.

  “300?” David said. “What’s that got to do with—”

  “Think about it,” Xander said. He flashed a big grin over his shoulder. “We’re going to be heading into worlds that so far haven’t been very friendly to us. We need guts! We need to be ready to fight! Doesn’t this psych you up for that?” He released the poster, which snapped back into a roll, and snatched up another one. He spread it out against the wall.

  “Gladiator! ” David announced: Russell Crowe looking bad and ready to take on the world.

  “Yeah?” Xander said, nodding his head with enthusiasm.

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. He was studying the poster with narrow eyes, as though judging a science fair project.

  “We can play some music too,” Xander said. “I’ve got tons of soundtracks. Stuff that will really get your blood pumping, you know? We can get one of those clock radios you connect your iPod to. Toria, put that on your list.”

  She scribbled it down.

  Xander nodded toward the posters. “I got Commando, Die Hard, Matrix . . .”

  “I like where you’re going with this,” Dad said. He was using his teacher voice. “What bothers me is”—he put his finger on Russell Crowe’s breastplate—“we’re not these people. We don’t have their training, their physical attributes . . .”

  “That’s not the point, Dad!” Xander said. “These help us get jazzed up for going over. Mentally, we’re these guys. We’re ready! We’re tough! We can do it!”

  Dad nodded but said, “I understand the mental part. I just don’t want us to go diving headlong into a situation we’re not ready for.”

  “All right, look,” Xander said. He released the poster and quickstepped to the far end of the room. “How about if right here”— he turned in a circle, indicating the floor under him—“we train to be like those guys? We get in physical shape, and we learn whatever skills we might need in whatever world we’re heading to.”

  Dad shook his head. “Xander—”

  Xander cut him off. “Dad! Even if I never learned how to wield a sword or hold a shield, just having the never-say-die warriors of 300 on my mind would have made me better at fighting that gladiator in the Colosseum. Maybe if you hadn’t rescued me, I could have fought him off long enough to have found my own way back home, I don’t know. But I do know soldiers in war get psyched up like this.”

  “And soccer players,” David chimed.

  “Right, athletes!” Xander said. “You’re a history teacher. You’ve studied war. You told me once that battles are won in the mind long before they’re won on the battlefield. Isn’t this what you meant?”

  Dad walked to where Xander stood on the other side of the room and looked around, as if trying to see it with Xander’s eyes. After a time he smiled and nodded, then said, “Toria, put free weights and exercise mats on the list. Xander, get those posters up on the wall. David, don’t you have some killer video game posters?”

  David jumped up. “Halo, Metroid, Call of Duty.”

  “Do they make you want to kick some butt?”

  “Oh, yeah!”

  “Go get ’em.” Dad clapped his hands together. “Come on, guys, let’s do this!”

  CHAPTER thirty

  MOTHER OF MERCY NURSING HOME

  Jesse Wagner fidgeted in his wheelchair. He looked at the clock for the thousandth time. Where was Keal? If anyone there would listen to him, it was Keal. To most of the staff at Mother of Mercy, he was just an old man. Heck, he was just an old man to the other old men and women who frittered away their final days in that depressing place. But Keal Jackson was different; he treated people with respect. He was an attendant at the home and knew who still had a light burning in the attic and who didn’t.

  Shafts of light from sodium vapor lamps in the parking lot streamed through the dirty windows of the community room. Little flecks of dust floated in the light like tiny insects with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

  But Jesse did have something to do. Trouble was, he had no way of doing it. Not alone, not by himself. It’d been decades since he could walk without a cane, and eight years now that he’d needed a wheelchair.

  He hunched over to stare at his slippered feet. “What good are you?” he yelled at them. “Can’t keep a body standing. Can’t even shuffle one in front of the other. What good are you!”

  A booming voice came from behind him: “You talking to yourself again, Jesse?”

  Finally!

  Jesse straightened and craned his head around. He said, “’Bout time, Keal. I been waiting for you since yesterday! Don’t you work anymore?”

  “Gotta have a day off sometime,” Keal answered. He came around and dropped into the sagging, cracked vinyl chair in front of Jesse. “Stop being such a grouch.” He smiled, a creepy, Cheshire cat thing straight out of Alice in Wonderland. The man’s skin was so dark, all Jesse’s aged vision could make out were Keal’s eyes and teeth.

  Jesse leaned forward to place a shaky hand on top of Keal’s and gave the attendant his most intent stare, trying to appear as serious and urgent as the task for which he needed Keal’s help.

  Keal misread the expression. “You suffering from gas today, Jesse?”

  “No!” Jesse yelled in his loudest voice, which wasn’t loud at all these days. The nurse at the desk in the corner didn’t even look up from her magazine. He snatched his hand away and flapped it at the big black man. “I’ve got urgent business, Keal! Life-and-death business!”

  “You don’t say.” Keal leaned forward.

  Jesse sighed with exaggeration. “Listen to me,” he said, taking time to make his words clear and strong soundi
ng. “You’ve known me for what, six years?”

  Keal nodded. “Since I started here.”

  “Have you ever seen me lose my grip on reality? Have I ever rambled about dragons the way ol’ Charlie Hobbs used to, God rest his soul? Have I ever thought the cafeteria was a sandy beach in Hawaii, the way Mrs. Thompson does?” He shook his head. “Always taking off her shoes and trying to hang ten on the tables. Have you ever had to restrain me because I thought the night nurses had come to kill me like . . . well, like half the people here? Have you seen me do anything crazy?”

  Keal flashed his teeth at Jesse again. “I always said you got it together better than most of the staff, Jesse. I hope I’m half as aware when I’m your age . . . if I ever get to be your age.”

  “So you got to listen to me now, Keal. I mean it. I ain’t crazy, even though what I have to say will make me sound that way. Give me the benefit of the doubt, okay?”

  Keal’s teeth vanished, and the whites of his eyes narrowed. Jesse knew he was frowning.

  Good, he thought. He’s listening.

  “I need you to take me somewhere,” Jesse said. “Someplace important.”

  “Like . . . where? If it’s the restroom, Jesse, I got you covered, man. Any farther than that, we got a problem.”

  “California,” Jesse said firmly.

  Another flash of teeth, and Keal boomed with laughter. “Oh, Jesse, Jesse . . . you know I can’t take the residents outside the building, less’n it’s to the hospital, or maybe an occasional field trip to the park.”

  Jesse let him laugh. When it was all out of Keal, and the aide had caught his breath, Jesse said, “People will die if I don’t get there. Lots of people.”

  He felt Keal’s big hand on his knee.

  The attendant said, “Jesse . . . I . . . I don’t know what to say. You know—”

  “I know what I know,” Jesse snapped. “I have to get a message to someone, a message so important I have to do it in person. He may not believe me, otherwise. And I have to show him . . .”

  “Show him what?”

  Jesse closed his eyes. “I have to show him how to . . . to . . .” He didn’t know how to say it differently, but he also knew how it would sound. “I have to show him how to save the world.”