The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  The door we’d just come out of opened up again behind us and Fred Wishingham’s voice shouted, “Hold it right where you...” and then trailed off when Fred saw the things. “I was just going to tell you that some of those things had just turned around and headed over to where you’d be appearing... and, well, you already saw that.” Fred had lowered his voice like he’d just been caught shooting craps in Church.

  Ed nodded and I told Fred to get back inside.

  As I heard the lock click on the door, I whispered to Ed. “You think maybe they can read our minds?”

  Ed shrugged.

  The things were about 10, maybe 12 feet high and seemed to float above the ground on a circular frilled platform. I say ‘floated’ because they didn’t leave any marks as they moved along, not even in the soft dirt of the alleyway that ran behind Bill’s and Ma’s store.

  The platform was about a foot deep and, above that, the thing’s body kind of tapered up like a glass stem until it reached another frilly overhang – like a mushroom’s head – at the top. Halfway between the two platforms a collar of tendrils or thin wings – like the gossamer veils of a jellyfish – stuck out from the stem a foot or so and then drooped down limply about three feet. These seemed to twitch and twirl of their own accord, no matter whether a wind was blowing or not, and it didn’t take me too long to figure out these were what passed for arms and hands on the things’ own world.

  I looked up at the first creature’s top section, trying to see if there were any kind of air-holes or eyes but there was nothing, although the texture of the skin-covering was kind of opaque or translucent... see-through, for want of a better phrase, and I could see things moving around in there, shifting and re-forming. Where the noise they made came out, I couldn’t tell. And we never did find out.

  We watched as the creatures moved closer. Suddenly, the one at the front turned around real fast and the hand-arm things fluttered outwards, like a sheet settling on a bed, and, just for a moment, they touched my shoulder. There was something akin to affection there. At the time, I thought I was maybe imagining it... maybe reading the creature’s thought-waves or something, but I was later to discover that there was, if not an outright affection, then at least a feeling of familiarity on the creature’s part.

  This confrontation lasted only a few seconds, a minute at the most, and then the creatures moved back away from us in the direction of the Sherriff’s office, the wing things outstretched towards us as they went.

  “What did you make of that?” Ed Brewster said, his voice a little croaky and hoarse.

  “I have absolutely no idea at all,” I said.

  I kept watching because one of the creatures intrigued me more than the others. This one carried what seemed to be some kind of foam box, thick with piled-up layers of what looked like cotton candy. All the time we’d been ‘meeting’ with the leader – we supposed the thing that had touched me was the leader – this other creature was removing small pieces of foam which it seemed to absorb into its tendrils. It was still doing it as the three of them moved down the alleyway. Just as they reached the back of the Sherriff’s office, the leader put down its wings, turned around and, leaving the other two behind, moved up onto the sidewalk and out of sight.

  I turned at the sound of hurried footsteps behind me and saw Jimmy-James running along the alleyway, his face beaming a wide smile. Ma Chetton was following him, her head still turned in the direction of the street to see if any of the creatures were following her.

  “What about that!” JJ said. Then, “What about that!”

  I nodded and when I turned to look at Ed, he was nodding too. There didn’t seem much else to do.

  “Did they say anything?” Jimmy-James asked. “Did they say where they’ve come from?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Not a word. Just that mournful wailing. Gives me the creeps... sounds like a coyote.”

  “Or a baby teething,” Ma said breathlessly.

  “Same here,” said JJ. “I tried them with everything I know... English, French, German, Spanish, Russian... quite a few more. And I tried out a couple of hybrids, too.”

  “Like standing in the United Nations,” Ma Chetton muttered testily, her breath rasping. “Or hanging atop the Tower of Babel come Doomsday.”

  “What the hell are hybrids?” Ed Brewster asked.

  “Mixtures of two or three languages,” JJ explained. “In the old days, that was the way most folks communicated... I mean before any one single language or dialect had gained enough of a footing to be commonplace. And I tried them with all kinds of signs and stuff but they didn’t seem to know what I was doing. I thought maybe they would have known all about our language by listening to our radio waves out there in outer space. But it was no-go. I can’t figure out how they communicate with each other at all,” he said. “Unless it’s that wailing noise or maybe through that thing that one of them’s carrying around.”

  “You mean the box-thing? The thing that looks like a pile of cotton candy?”

  JJ nodded. “He’s messing with that thing all the time, changing it even as I’m trying to talk to them.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “but did you notice he’s taking things out instead of adding to what’s already in there.”

  “I’d noticed that,” JJ said. “I was wondering if that stuff is absorbed into him and enables him to communicate to the others. Like a translator.”

  I shrugged. It was all too much for me.

  Ed glanced around to make sure none of those creatures had sneaked up on him and said, “We figure they can read our minds.”

  “Really?” said JJ. “How’s that?”

  “Well,” Ed said, matter-of-factly, “they knew we were coming out here into the alleyway.”

  JJ frowned and glanced at me before returning his full attention to Ed.

  Ed gave a characteristic shrug. “Why else would they come on down here from the street if they didn’t know we were coming out?”

  While JJ mulled that over, I said, “What do you figure they want, JJ?”

  The back door to the poolroom opened and Abel Bodeen peered out. “Is there any of those things out there?”

  “Nope, they’ve gone down to see the Sherriff,” I said.

  Abel pulled a face and gave a wry smile. “That should please Benjamin no end,” he said with a chuckle.

  The fact was that the creatures did please Sherriff Ben Travers, as it turned out. Or they didn’t displease him anyway. The truth of the matter was that the aliens didn’t do anything to upset or irritate anyone. In fact, they didn’t do anything at all.

  “Why the hell did they come, Derby?” Abel Bodeen asked me a couple of days after they’d... after we’d first seen them.

  “Beats me,” I said.

  We were sitting out on the old straight-backed chairs Molly Waldon had left out in front of her and Vince’s General Store, watching the creatures wander around the town, just as they had been doing all the time. But I was watching a little more intently than I had done at first. The folks around town had become used to the aliens after two full days and nobody seemed to care much what they were there for. So it’s probably fair to say that people hadn’t picked up that the attitude of the creatures was changing. It wasn’t changing by much, but it was changing.

  “You’ve noticed, haven’t you?”

  I shielded my eyes from the glare of the late afternoon November sunshine and looked across at Jimmy-James. “Noticed what?”

  He looked across at two of the creatures gliding along the other side of the street. “They’re slowing down.”

  I followed his gaze and, sure enough, the creatures did seem to be slower than they had been at first. But it was more than that. They seemed to be more cautious. I mentioned this to JJ and Abel, and to Ed and Estelle who were leaning on what remained of an old hitching rail at the edge of the sidewalk.

  Ed snorted. “That don’t make no sense at all,” he said. “Why would they be cautious now, when they’ve been her
e two goddam days.”

  “Ed, watch your mouth,” Estelle whined in her high-pitched voice.

  “He’s right,” agreed Jimmy-James.

  “Who?” Ed asked. “Me or him?”

  “Both of you.” JJ got to his feet and strode across to the post behind Ed and leaned. “They are getting slower and they do seem to be more... more careful,” he said, choosing his words. “And, no, it doesn’t make any sense for them to be more careful the longer they’re here.”

  “Nothing for them to be nervous about, that’s for sure,” Abel said. “They’ve got us wrapped up neat as a Christmas gift.”

  The aliens had effectively cut off the town. There were no phone lines and the roads were... well, they were impassible. It was Doc Maynard had seen it first, trying to get his old Ford Fairlane out to check on Sally Iaccoca’s father, over towards Bellingham. Frank Iaccoca had taken a bad fall – cracked a couple of ribs, Doc said – and Doc had him trussed up like Boris Karloff in the old Mummy movie.

  The car had cut out three miles out of Forest Plains and there was nothing Doc could do to get it going again. So he’d come back into town for help, without even taking a look under the hood, and Abel, Johnny Deveraux and me had gone out there to give him some help. Johnny, who works at Phil Masham’s garage, had taken some tools and a spare battery in case it was something simple he could fix out on the road. Doc Maynard was not renowned for looking after his automobile.

  When we got out there, Johnny tried the ignition and it was dead. But when he made to move around to the front of the car to open the hood he suddenly started floundering and dropped the battery. That’s when we found the barrier.

  A ‘force field’ is what Jimmy-James called it.

  Everything looked completely normal up ahead in front of Doc Maynard’s Fairlane but there was no way for us to get to it. It felt like cloth but not porous. JJ said it was an invisible synthetic membrane – whatever that was – and he reckoned the creatures had set it up around the town to protect their spaceship. Sure enough, the same barrier travelled all the way around town... or so we figured. We tried different points on farm tracks and woodland paths and each one came to a complete halt.

  Like it or not, we were caught like fish in a bowl. But that didn’t seem to matter... at least not until JJ took a look in the creatures’ ‘book’.

  “There he goes, if it is a ‘he’,” said Jimmy-James, pointing to the creature with the box of cotton candy. The funny thing was that the box now looked to have a lot less of the stuff in it than it had done at first. The first time we’d seen it, the thing had looked to be almost full.

  “The other thing,” said JJ in a soft voice that made you think he was realising what he was about to say at exactly the same time as he said it, “is they seem not to be touching people with those... those veil-things.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I guess that was what I meant about them being more cautious. Part of it, anyway.”

  Ed snorted. “Maybe it’s a case of the more they see of us the less they like.”

  Estelle rubbed Ed Brewster’s oiled hair and puckered up her mouth. “I’m sure they like what they see of you, honey,” she trilled without changing the shape of her mouth. “Anyone would.” It sounded as though Estelle was talking to a newborn babe sitting in a stroller. Ed must’ve thought so, too, because he told her to can it while he readjusted his quiff.

  “We need to get a look in that box-thing,” JJ said.

  “How we going to do that?” I asked. “And what good is it going to do us anyway? Just looks like a load of gunk to me.”

  JJ stepped away from the rail and out onto the street. “That’s just it,” he shouted over his shoulder as he strode across to the creature with the box. “None of us has seen what’s in there, not up close.”

  We watched the confrontation.

  Jimmy-James stopped right in front of the creature and it turned around. Almost immediately, the little veil-arms wafted out as though blown by a breeze and settled on JJ’s shoulders, the wailing sound rising a pitch or two in the process. Then it started to back away, its arms still blowing free.

  JJ shouted over to me to come on along. Ed Brewster stood up and moved alongside me. “I’m coming, too,” he said.

  “Now you be careful what you’re doing, Ed, honey,” Estelle warbled.

  “I will, Estelle, I will,” Ed said, with maybe just a hint of a sigh. And the two of us walked onto the street to join JJ. Which was how we got into the creatures’ spaceship.

  The alien with the book kept on backing away from the three of us and we just kept on walking after it. Eventually, we reached the ship where we discovered two more of the creatures standing by the ramp.

  The creatures then backed on up into the ship. We kept on following.

  A few minutes later the three of us were standing amidst a whole array of what looked to be lumps of foam, all of various size, piled up on or stuck against other lumps. Some of the lumps were circular – cylindrical, JJ said – and others looked like tears of modelling clay thumbed into place by a gigantic hand without design or reason.

  Up inside the ship, the things’ wing-arms were fluttering faster and more frequently than ever... and the alien that we reckoned to be recording the whole visit was mightily busy, removing small pieces of foam with the tendrils and absorbing them. When I glanced inside the box, I saw there was hardly anything in it.

  Over to one side of the crowded room a wide lamp-thing stood by itself. Standing beneath the lamp, two aliens were seemingly absorbed in another of the boxes, their wings-arms fluttering like a leaf caught in a draft. This particular box was completely full, a collection of multi-colored shapes and lumps and pieces, all pressed into each other or standing alone.

  “We need to get a look at that,” JJ whispered to Ed and me.

  “Leave it to me,” Ed Brewster said. He walked across to the box and lifted it with both hands. “Okay if I borrow this for a while, ol’ buddy?” he said, waving the box in front of the two creatures.

  The things didn’t seem to do anything as Ed stepped back and moved back alongside us, although their arms were fluttering faster than ever. Then, suddenly, the little arm-wings dropped limp and the two creatures turned around. As they did this, the creature standing in front of the other two in the center of the room waved its arms and then it, too, spun around.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jimmy-James said. “I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this.”

  As we ran down the platform leading back onto Sycamore Street I asked Jimmy-James what he’d meant by that last remark. But he just shook his head.

  “It’s too fantastic to even think about,” was all he’d say. “Just let me take a look at the box and then maybe I’ll be able to get an idea.”

  We high-tailed it back to Jack and Edna Bannister’s house down on Beech Avenue and, while me and Ed drank cup after cup of JJ’s mom’s strong coffee, JJ himself pored over the contents of the alien box. It was almost three in the morning when a wild-eyed Jimmy-James rushed into the Bannisters’ lounge and slammed the box onto the table. Ed was asleep, curled up like a baby on the sofa, and I was reading the TV Guide.

  “I have to look at the other box,” he said. “Now!”

  Ed smacked his lips together loudly and shuffled around on the sofa.

  I looked up from a feature on Gilligan’s Island and was immediately surprised to see how much Jimmy-James resembled that hapless shipwreck survivor. “What’s up?”

  JJ shook his head and ran his hands through his hair. I noticed straight away that they were shaking. “A lot, maybe... maybe nothing. I don’t know.”

  “You want to—”

  “I’ve been through all of the usual coding techniques,” JJ said, ticking off on his outstretched fingers. “I’ve applied the Patagonian Principle of repeated shapes, colour motifs, spacing... I’ve run the Spectromic Law of shading relationships and the old Inca constructional communication dynamics...”

 
I held up a hand and waved for him to stop. “Whoa, boy... what the hell are you talking about?”

  JJ crouched down in front of me and looked up into my eyes. “It makes sense,” he said. “I’ve made it work... made the patterns fit.”

  “You understand it?” I glanced across at the box of jumbled shapes. “That?”

  JJ nodded emphatically. “Yes!” he said. Then, “No! Oh, God, I don’t know. That’s why I need to check. And I need to do it tonight. Tomorrow may be too late.”

  “I still don’t know what you’re—”

  The resident genius of Forest Plains placed a hand on my knee. “No time,” he said. “No time to talk. It has to be now.”

  I studied his face for a few seconds, saw the look in his eyes: there was an urgent need there, sure... but there was something else, too. It was fear. Jimmy-James Bannister looked as scared as any man could be. “Okay, let’s go do it.”

  He stood up and looked at Ed. “What about him?”

  “He’ll be fine. We expecting any trouble in there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  And we went.

  The ship was silent and dark. JJ borrowed his old man’s flashlight and the two of us crept up that platform and into the depths of the creatures’ rocketship. The place was deserted, which was just as well. It didn’t take too long before JJ found the second box – the one the creature had been using all the time – and he scooped it into his arms and rushed back out of the ship.

  We were back in the house almost as soon as we had left. The whole thing had taken less than ten minutes.

  I watched as JJ sat in front of the new box – now containing but a few lumps and dollops of that clay-stuff – wringing his hands and muttering to himself. I couldn’t stand it any more and I grabbed a hold of JJ and shook him until I could hear his teeth clattering. “What the hell is it, JJ... why don’t you tell me for God’s sake.”