World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  The man comes over and kneels beside me, and I flinch as I feel something press against my head. It’s a knife blade—he’s cutting the sack away from my scalp, peeling it off like a caul. The world is revealed, only marginally more visible than when I was hooded. A moonlit barn, dark and cobwebbed and warm. The smell of horses and horse shit. I take three long gasping breaths and find the man’s face and stare him in the eye.

  “You can’t leave me here.”

  “It is four days only,” he says, pointing at the sky. “Only four days.”

  He places the dog gently at my side. Houdini immediately begins to lap the dirty water of a puddle.

  “Have mercy,” I say to the man. He draws his hand down along his face, surveys me lying in the dirt.

  “This is mercy,” he says, and then he goes. The rattle of a chain, tying the barn door closed. The loud crunch of the Amish guy’s boots through the cornfields, quieter and quieter as he walks away.

  2.

  Country silence. Country darkness.

  Don’t fall asleep, Henry. Don’t go to sleep.

  That’s the first thing. The first thing is simply to stay awake. The second thing is to keep things in perspective. Surviving challenging circumstances, I have found, is very often a matter of keeping things in perspective. The last time I found myself in a situation like this, left high and dry like this, I hadn’t merely been kicked by a horse, I’d been shot. I’d taken a sniper’s bullet high in my right arm, which ruptured the brachial artery, and that was bad, that was definitely real bad. I was bleeding out in a tower watching the day fade to night, until my sister came to rescue me on a helicopter, of all things, the blades swicking against the sunset, the big loud thing lowering to get me.

  This time she won’t come. Of course not—I’m supposed to be rescuing her.

  The first step is easy. Now that I’m not being force-marched through a field in the rain, now that the mask has been pulled from my eyes and I can concentrate, it takes all of five minutes to pry my wrists far enough apart to access the knots with my long fingers and worry the knots open and free my hands. A couple of minutes more and my legs are free also, and I can get up and stagger about the barn.

  Where’d they get it, I think suddenly. That helicopter. The troubling thought appears as it has on occasion before, floating to life unbidden like a laughing ghost … if they’re such hapless dimwits, Nico’s pals, if they’re deluded losers chasing their illusory asteroid-foiling scenario like children playing dress-up—then where’d they get a helicopter? Where, indeed, did they get the Internet access that Jordan allowed me the use of, that last night in Concord; the same night he stood, smug and taunting, telling me there was more to it than I could possibly know. More than Nico could possibly know …

  Leave it. Come on, Palace, leave it. Stay focused. It doesn’t matter right now, obviously. Now I need to keep working. I need to get out of the barn.

  I walk around, a couple of wobbly circuits, sniffing in the corners like an animal, getting a sense of the place. It’s a barn, is all, a barn like all barns. A big abandoned drafty room, maybe thirty feet by sixty feet, split into three sections: feeding stations on either end, where the animals were slopped or given their oats, and then in the middle the smaller area for hay storage. Walls constructed of wooden planks, old but sturdy, securely joined. Peaked roof. Racks on the wall where once the tools were hung. A ladder to a loft, six flat wooden rungs leading up. I stop and breathe, holding one hand over my nose. The fetid humidity of the place is like another person trapped in here with me, a dismal clinging presence tracking my steps.

  Whatever animals once resided here, it can be presumed, have long ago been taken out for slaughter. Plenty of hay, though, piles of it, old and stale and cracking in bales and loose piles.

  There is only one entrance, the big double barn door, which I know to be chained from the outside. And I can tell from here that the trio of tiny windows, letting in moonlight up on the loft level, are too small to accommodate a grown man—no matter how thin, no matter how desperate to squeeze through.

  “What else, Detective?” My voice is tired, too, worn and gray. I clear my throat and try it again. “What else?”

  There’s nothing else. Houdini has given in to sleep and lies curled into himself beside his small puddle. I try the door, just to try. I grab the handle and shake it, hear the mocking jangle of the chains on the other side.

  I step away from the door. Under the thick odor of the barn I smell myself; days of sweat, of fear, faint stale whiffs of burnt chicken and charcoal.

  There was a barn on the edge of my grandfather’s property when we were growing up, one of several outbuildings no longer in use. Some ancestral Palace, in the mists of New Hampshire history, had kept horses, but all that remained by the time my sister and I found the place—by the time it became one of her innumerable hideouts—all that was left was old hay, rusted instruments, the earthy odors of manure and sweating animals.

  I found her out there once, drinking whiskey she had siphoned from Grandfather’s stash, the day she was supposed to be taking the SAT.

  I smile to myself now, in the darkness of the Amish barn. One thing about Nico, she never apologized. Never lied.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be taking the SAT?” I asked her.

  “Yuppers.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Drinking whiskey in the barn. You want some?”

  I did not want some. I dragged her home. Reregistered her for the test, drove her myself.

  Hide-and-seek, our whole lives.

  Houdini is up, rustling around in the hay, chasing after a mouse, batting helplessly at the ground. I watch the little mammal escape the clutches of my addled dog, watch it slip through the tiny gap beneath the bottom edge of the slat. I get down on all fours beside the dog, sniff at the hole. A whisper of cool air from outside; the smell of the grass of the farm. But it’s a mouse hole. A bare smudged circle in the ground.

  I stare at the hole.

  It would take a long time, but I could do it. Give me a month, maybe. Give me a year. Give me a year and give me a shovel and I could bust right on out of here, worm myself through and emerge gasping like a jailbreak prisoner on the other side. Just give me time.

  I go back to the door and throw one shoulder against it and it does not give at all, just shudders and throws me backward and I land in the hay with my broken ribs screaming. I struggle up and try it again, and the pain is even worse—and again—and again. I imagine Cortez back in Rotary, working on the sealed floor, while I work on this chained barn door, the two of us pushing and pushing, and wouldn’t it be something if he was somehow on the opposite side of this door, and I’ll smash through just as he smashes through and we’ll tumble into each other like slapstick comedians.

  I turn away from the door, hunched over and heaving breaths, my sweat dripping from my forehead into the dirt and the hay. Houdini meanwhile is utterly outclassed by the mouse. It runs right by his nose and he watches it, his wet eyes flickering as the thing scampers past.

  * * *

  I climb slowly, wincing with each step, my rib ends jabbing at tender spots in my lungs or intestines. Then I’m poking my head up over the lip of the loft and what’s up here is a private universe, the second hidden paradise I’ve stumbled upon in two days. Four bales of hay arranged into a semicircle around a three-legged wooden stool. Milking stool, some old part of my memory announces. That right there is a milking stool. I manage to wrestle my ungainly battered body the rest of the way up, to examine the small transistor radio seated on the stool. A plastic metal rectangle with a circular mesh face over the speaker, antenna like a stiffened tail, jutting up at a sharp angle.

  I lift the radio, feel the weight of batteries inside. Flick it on—nothing—it’s a paperweight. I switch it off. I set it back down.

  I can see a little better up here; I’m closer to the row of tiny roof windows, and the moon is getting higher and brighter. On the h
ay-strewn floor of the loft, nestled facedown beside one of the bales, is a small handheld mirror. I lift it and examine my face in the smudged and cloudy glass: a haggard and gaunt old man, eyes red-rimmed and sunken. My mustache is overgrown, the rest of my beard coming in uneven, like wild grass on a cliff. I look crazy, lycanthropic. I lower the looking glass.

  There are cigarette butts in a little wooden cup. Like a dice cup, from a board game. I tip the butts out into my palm. Store bought, generic, hand-rolled. Months old. Dried out by summer heat. Stale and crumbling.

  I take a look back down at the main floor. Houdini is asleep. No sign of the mouse. I’m the only one left awake, way up high; surveying my domain—the suffering king of the spooky old barn.

  I settle down on one of the bales of hay, fight fiercely against a fresh urge of tiredness. A dead radio, a bunch of old smokes, a smudged mirror. This was someone’s hideout, someone’s private place, sometime not too long ago. A young Amish girl by herself in the darkness of the barn, smoking secret cigarettes and listening to forbidden music from somewhere far away.

  I can’t help it, I’m picturing this kid looking like Nico, like Nico as she was in high school, doing her own sneaking off, her own romantic dreaming, sipping Grandfather’s eye-watering spirits out in the barn. It’s like what Cortez said, about me, about the girl with the tiger problem, everything reminds you of your sister.

  I have an idea, a terrible idea, but as soon as I think of it I know that it’s what I’m going to do. The only thing I can do, really, the only option available.

  There was a fire in the jail. Creekbed Penitentiary. The quick unbearable story that Billy told me. The prisoners were getting restless and desperate because the world had abandoned them, left them trapped, waiting forgotten until the end.

  My terrible idea is radiant and bright.

  I cannot stay in here for three days, growing hungry and going mad with waiting. I cannot suffer four nights and three days and then still die not knowing where she is or why.

  I have to do this next thing, and whatever happens as a result is just what happens, and that’s all there is to it.

  “How did you light them, kiddo?” I ask the phantom of the girl in the hayloft. “How did you light your smokes?”

  It doesn’t take long to find them. Black twisted stumps of matches like tiny little burned-down trees, surrounding the dirt beneath the bale. The rest of the matches are close by, two half-used-up books tucked together beneath one of the legs of the stool. The matchbooks are as old as the cigarettes, the sticks crumbling and breaking. But I try one, and it lights right away.

  I stare at the dancing match light until it burns my fingers and I blow it out. Maybe this is rash. Maybe it’s all a hallucination, maybe I’ve dreamed up the whole thing: an issue in the prefrontal cortex, neurons firing wild. Nico is fine. I’m fine. I was given an early retirement from the Concord force, late last year, because I was succumbing to some genetic predisposition for mental illness, driving my department Impala up onto the sidewalk, screaming to strangers about an interstellar object the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs.

  Not so, though. It isn’t so.

  It’s out there. Closer, now. Closer than the sun; closer than Venus. Our nearest neighbor, the author of our destruction. Accelerating in accordance with Kepler’s third law: the closer it gets, the faster it comes. A ball player hurtling for home, a horse breaking into a gallop when it smells the barn.

  I’ve got to get out of here.

  I climb down the ladder and scoop Houdini up under my arm, carry the poor sick dog uncomplaining, struggle him up to the loft and lay him down. I kick out one of the small windows easily, one fake karate-chop kick with the strong side of my body. Before I can think about it too much I toss the dog out the window, and he barks as he falls end over end, his body catching as I had planned it on the bank of shrubs below. He scrabbles on the uneven surface of the hedgerow, tumbles forward and lands with a whomp in a patch of mud. Looks up at me, confused.

  I toss a salute down to the dog, light another match from the matchbook, and set the hay on fire.

  * * *

  It happens a lot faster than I thought it would, old dry hay and wooden timbers, much faster than I in my rashness and desperation had really contemplated. One small fire touching off new small fires in all directions, small fires growing together and becoming large, dancing up, reaching for the rafters. I retreat, stumble backward, miss the ladder and roll down from the loft onto the hard dirt floor, landing flat, flipping over and moving as fast as I can away from the growing fire up there, my black shoes pulling through the barn-floor mud.

  Immediately I regret my plan. I crouch in a corner staring up in horror, watching the burning embers float over the edge of the loft, float and then rain. The fire is literally raining down, sending sparks and small twirling pieces of hay over the edges of the loft. The black and gray of the midnight barn has erupted in red, and after all this was a mistake—better to starve and die in the barn than burn. I race to the door and pound on it hard, the heavy wooden beams thudding against my fist, while the floor of the barn turns to fire all around me, new gouts of flame, now it’s like hell’s floor, patches of burning ground on all sides.

  The heat is crowding in, splinters tumbling down from the roof, the roof beginning to crack above me. If it’s going to work, if anyone is going to see it, they’ll see it now—it will get no brighter, I don’t see how. It’s a furnace in here, I’m here in a furnace. In the last instant, I grab like a maniac at the handle of the barn door, pulling, knowing it’s useless but pulling, and the pain on my hands is instant and intense and scalding, and I hear this weird distant screaming—a screech, a call, a cry. Is it me? Is that me screaming? I think that it is, I think I’m screaming.

  3.

  There is no strange swim back up from unconsciousness this time, no sneaky dreams of Nico. I’m just awake, looking from left to right in a small warm room. I’m on a bed. The room is beige, off-white. A wooden door. The bed has a quilt on it, lovely and plain.

  The first thing I do is cough. Taste smoke and ash in my throat. I cough again, louder, violently, my body buckling upward, cough so hard and so loud that my stomach starts to ache. When I have recovered, managed to take three normal slow breaths, I realize that I am still dressed, T-shirt and shoes and long pants. Fully dressed under the covers like a little kid whose parents carried him, sleeping, in from the car.

  I cough one more time, look around for a glass of water and find a pitcher and a cup. I pour myself a cup and drink it, then pour the rest and drink that, too. It’s a bedroom. Wooden bed frame and wooden nightstand and four undecorated walls. Plain white muslin curtains, pulled back from the single plain window and tied with twine. I can taste smoke inside my lungs, I feel heavy with it, like there was a fire inside my mouth and esophagus that was doused with thick wet foam. There is also a new nasty pain on the palms of my hands—I look down and see that both hands are thickly bandaged, mummy hands. Beneath the bandages, they burn and sting. I groan, try to roll my body slightly, one way and then the other, shift out of the discomfort. It feels like I should probably be dead by now.

  When my grandfather said “Dig a hole” he was in hospice, at the very, very end, the absolute last thing he said before he died, the last event of his life. I was sitting beside him waiting, as we had been waiting for months, more or less. Grandfather’s breaths rolling in and out on rusty wheels, in and out, each one emerging with more difficulty than the last. His eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, his cheeks hollowed out, body twitching. Neither one of us were churchgoers, but I felt that as the responsible adult I needed to ask: did he want me to get someone? “Someone?” he said, even though he knew what I meant, but I pressed on, fulfilling my obligations, trying to get everything down according to procedure. “Someone,” I said. “A priest. To do last rites.” He laughed, with effort, a low, gasping chuckle. “Henry,” he said. “Dig a hole.”

  I shift on
the bed. It feels better now—marginally better. I can move.

  There’s my sport jacket. Folded nicely at the foot of the bed. I stand up, waver a little, unfold the coat and slip it on. My little treasure trove is still in the inside pocket: The picture of young Nico. The butt of the American Spirit. The plastic fork. My notebook, nearly full. Only thing missing is the SIG. Everything else still in its place.

  I pick up the jug and tilt it back and swallow the last drops of the water.

  There’s no mirror in the room, no pictures, no paintings. The Casio says 5:45, but the information seems abstract; incomplete. Five forty-five when? How long have I been under? It’s an uncomfortable relationship you develop with sleep, at a time like this, it feels like every time you close your eyes you could wake up on the last day of the world.

  I get up and out of the bed, relieved to find that I can walk with only a little difficulty. I cough again on the way to the door, try the handle and find it locked from the other side, as I had a feeling it would be—but as soon as I rattle it, someone cries out on the other side.

  “He’s awake!” A woman’s voice, relieved, joyous even. “Praise God! The boy is awake.”

  The boy. Is that me? A scrape of a chair, then another scrape. Two people out there, sitting in the hallway, waiting for me. A vigil. The second voice I recognize.

  “Be still. Stay.” Old man, thick neck, beard. The creak of his boots approaching the door. I hear the lock click open, and I step back, my heart tightening. I remember his hands at my back in the cornfield, shoving me forward. The door sneaks open, letting in a sliver of light from the hallway. He is there, my assailant from the roadway, black coat, large body, just outside the door.