Brick leaned into the window, his bulk casting the cab in shadow. The wound was there, the greasy rag around the left leg, but there were no oil stains on the man’s clothes. “No. It’s not you. Not yet.”
This is getting off track. Concentrate, Davey boy. Focus.
“I need you to do something, Brick.” Everything was a jumble. David had met Brick at Manic Muffins months ago, but now he’d apparently met Brick at a bar. “I need you to do something, not for me, for everyone.”
He pulled a lanyard from inside his shirt and held it out to Brick. “Come on. Take it.”
Brick took it gently, looking at it like it might bite him.
“It’s my key card to get into the lab. It will get you through the front gate, into the building and into the collider’s bridge.” A pain almost as bad as pulling out the knife lanced through David’s leg. “You have to—” He stopped, sucking in air. “You have to stop Skid.”
Brick stood back. “Why? Why’s Skid so important in all this?”
He doesn’t know. Bless him, he doesn’t know. “Because she wants to turn off the collider. She wants to stop the experiment.”
“But you said she should.”
A realization jumped into David’s mind; this Brick might not be the Brick he’d met. This might be a different Brick; from the past, or from somewhere else.
“That wasn’t me, at least not-now me.” As the words left his mouth David knew they sounded like bad middle school poetry. “Look, you have to stop Skid.”
Brick took another step back from the truck. “What if I can’t stop her?”
“Then,” David said, putting the truck in drive, “she’s going to kill us all.”
In the rearview mirror, he watched Brick push the key card and lanyard into his shirt pocket and glare at him until he turned left at the stoplight. David had to keep the collider on, even if he had to kill these idiots to do it.
7
People started arriving at the Sanderson Murder House at 6 p.m. for the 7 p.m. tour. Some milled in the yard trading stories and comparing ghost-hunting tools while others walked around the house taking pictures. One guy, Phil Preston from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, came inside to buy a Pepsi jacked up by Cord to $2.50 a bottle.
“When does the magic start?” Skid asked, sitting on the kitchen counter and flipping a meat cleaver in the air.
Cord gave Phil his change and motioned another man in a Razorbacks polo to the hallway and back toward the front of the house.
“The tour starts soon,” he said, looking around. Two heads bobbed past an open kitchen window. “Although paranormal events can happen at any time,” his voice raised just enough to carry outside, “the ghosts seem to like it better at night.”
Skid caught the blade as Cord stepped closer.
“This is my livelihood. Don’t try to ruin this for me,” he whispered. “What do you do for a living, anyway?”
“I work security at concerts and occasionally have to tackle violent drunks.”
He reached an open hand toward her. “Figures. Now, give me the knife before you hurt me with it.”
She ignored his hand and slipped the heavy blade into the type of wooden cutlery rack everyone had in 1982.
“I grew up in the circus,” she said, now fingering the handle of the butcher knife. “We had a midway. Most circuses don’t have those.” She pulled the knife halfway from its slot and absentmindedly slid it back in. “When my father took over the business, there weren’t any brothers left in Roe Bros. All his uncles and great uncles had gone to whatever afterlife circus people go to. He wanted to offer something different. A circus, a zoo and a carnival, all for the price of admission.”
Cord lifted the cutlery rack and moved it across the room. “Businesses adapt to demand or they die.” He turned and looked at her. “Or they give the public something it didn’t know it wanted.”
Skid put a finger to the side of her nose. “I learned a lot from the old guys who ran grifts on the midway,” she continued, leaning forward on the counter. “One of the things was not to oversell the grift.”
Cord’s forehead creased. “Are you trying to help me?”
Skid dropped off the counter, her Hello Kitty shoes making little sound as they hit the linoleum. “I’m just pointing out your little—” She stopped and looked around. No one was close enough to hear. “—gimmicks might be overselling it.”
He smiled, honestly for the first time today. “Is this your apology for threatening to kill me?”
The paring knife Cord didn’t even know was missing from the rack suddenly appeared in Skid’s hand. With a flick of her wrist, the knife flew past him and stuck into the wooden rack millimeters from its slot.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said, pulling her ponytail tight and walking into the hallway.
8
The elevator door didn’t budge.
“Come on. Come on. Come on.”
Another roar bellowed from somewhere on the floor, too close for Karl to hold his bowels steady for long. Scream-like squalls from things that could no longer scream had chased him from HR, followed by thumping, specifically the thumping of heavy feet on a metal floor. Karl had stopped that thumping, locked it tight in engineering because he no longer needed engineers. They’d all screamed, too. Then they stopped. Now the thumping was in HR. Oscar was in HR.
He swiped the key card closer and harder to the elevator door sensor. No beep.
“Come on,” he whispered, then winced at what sounded like a desk slamming into a wall.
“Mirrrooooo,” Oscar howled, the sound of its voice echoing down the hallway.
“No, no, no,” the words barely moved past Karl’s tongue as he swiped the card again and again.
Thump.
“No.” Karl didn’t register if this word came out. It didn’t matter. Oscar was closer.
He pinched the card in a fist and swiped it again across the sensor, his breath coming in pants.
“Mirrrooooo.”
He’s yelling for me. He’s yelling Miller. No, no, no. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.
“Beep.” The light on the sensor turned from red to green. The world around Karl Miller stopped, the silence as pure as what Karl expected death to be like. The key card activated the door.
“Mirrrooooo.”
The doors slid open and Karl fell into the elevator. His world shook as Dr. Oscar Montouez’s slab-like feet slammed again and again onto the hallway floor.
I left him in engineering. He can’t be here. He ca—
“Mirrrooooo.”
Karl rose to his knees and pounded the keys with a fist. “Close. Damn you. Close.”
The elevator doors began to slide shut as the enormous shadow of the engineer Karl had hired loomed close. Karl did not turn around to look at him.
“Igeyou Mirrrooooo,” it bellowed, the force of the sound throwing Karl backward.
“No,” the word came out in a sob.
The doors slid shut and the elevator began to move. Oscar slammed against the metal. As the elevator car shook, Karl hugged the floor.
“Mirrrooooo,” Oscar howled again, but music began to play in the elevator and Karl pretended he didn’t hear it.
9
A crowd of people stood in the front yard of the Sanderson Murder House. Brick checked his phone. It was 6:45 p.m. He opened the gate, which felt more familiar than the rest of his life at the moment even though he’d only first opened it late this morning. It certainly felt more familiar than the apartment he’d walked to after David’s truck chugged away from what had once been his storefront. It turned out his apartment wasn’t his anymore either. At least the nice Tunisian family who now lived there, the Bejaouis, hadn’t called the police when he walked in. They’d insisted he eat some freshly made kefta before he left. This reality, he hoped, was close to his own; his key still worked.
Brick c
ould sense the excitement in the group, no doubt fueled by the article in The Star, or The Times, or whatever. He was sick of the coincidences, the changes. He just wanted his muffin shop back. Then why the secrecy? tiptoed across his noggin. The second warning? The key card? Brick didn’t know exactly why he held back this information. It was just something in his gut. I’ll tell them when I need to. But he didn’t know when that was.
“Chauncey?” a woman’s voice spoke from somewhere in the gathering.
A total of five people outside his graduating class knew Brick’s real name, and the only one here in that club was Skid. It wasn’t her. He kept walking; people moved aside without really seeing him.
“Chauncey,” the voice said again.
This time he stopped and hoped to hell it was no one from high school. A woman pressed through the group with much more difficulty than Brick. Her shoulder-length hair bobbed as she weaved. She did a side-step dance around a young woman dressed in dark grays and blacks.
Beverly. Beverly Gibson, the one who abandoned Brick in the bathroom at Slap Happy’s the night this shitshow hit the fan. She approached him smiling, resting a warm hand on his hairy forearm. In the other hand, she held a reporter’s notebook.
“I am so happy to see you.” The emphasis on ‘so’ drew the tiny word out by at least three extra letters. “I had so many calls Friday night, your number got knocked off my phone.”
“Wha—” He stopped and coughed. “What happened to you?” Brick’s tongue felt heavy, the words hard to get out. Sure, he’d only known her for an hour and a half, but still, not cool.
Her grip tightened. “I am so sorry about that. I got a call from my editor about a fire; I had to go.” She held the notebook up. Beverly Gibson, Reporter: The Kansas City Times was handwritten on the cover. “I just figured I’d call when it was over, but then I got calls about something that happened at the murder house, and by then—”
“My number got knocked off your phone,” he finished for her, his voice trailing off when he realized he’d seen her name already today; it was the byline on the Sanderson Murder House story. She didn’t say she worked for the paper. But the signs had been there. Her first “like” on the Turbodate.com profile was journalism, then there were all the pens she’d pulled from her purse at the restaurant.
She smiled. It was a nice smile. An honest smile. “Yeah.” She slipped the notebook in her back pocket and grabbed his other arm. “I felt so bad. I was having a good time on our date.”
“You could have called my store in the morning,” Brick said.
Her smile widened. “Yes, but you never told me the name. You just said you make muffins. Do you know how many places in the metro area make muffins?”
“Lots?”
A laugh, loud and honest, burst out. “Yeah, lots.” She released his arm and pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “I shouldn’t have agreed to a date when I was on call, but I really wanted to meet you.” She held up the phone for Brick to see and dialed the ringtone volume to off. “I’m not on call tonight.” Beverly looked up at him. “So, Chauncey, are you into ghosts?”
Maybe this coincidence stuff isn’t bad after all.
“Everyone calls me Brick.”
10
The tour began precisely at 7 p.m. with a ghost story to set the mood. Cord worked the crowd, making everyone feel like he was telling them the story personally. He’d be a good ringmaster, Skid thought as Cord stopped to build to the proper crescendo next to a particularly pretty young woman in a pink blouse. Dad would like him. The thought sent a shiver down her back.
Brick motioned to her. He stood well behind the tour next to a woman she recognized but wasn’t sure why. Something was different about Brick. The way he stood? No. Dressed? No. Then she realized what was different. He wore a smile.
Skid made her way through the group Cord led into the front room of the Sanderson Murder House and walked up to Brick.
“What’s the status?” Brick asked. Skid shrugged.
“Dave’s still sacked out on the couch in Cord’s office,” she said, looking the woman over. “You look familiar. Have we met?”
Just as the woman opened her mouth to respond, Skid knew. “You’re Beverly Gibson, the reporter.”
Beverly nodded, a faux-shy smile on her face. “Guilty. And you are?”
“Suspicious. Of everything.” Her attention rose to meet Brick. “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”
“Well, it was just the one date on—” He stopped, a look of revelation swept across his face. “Friday.”
“Friday?” Skid pointed toward Beverly’s chest. “Then she’s part of it.”
“Wait a second.” Beverly held up her hands to form a T. “Time out. I feel like I’m missing something.”
“Friday,” Skid said, ignoring them. “Things started to go wrong Friday. Have you noticed anything strange?”
Beverly looked up at Brick, whose gentle face seemed to calm her. Then her gaze drifted back to Skid.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Well, yeah. There is this one thing.” Pink washed across her light complexion. “I didn’t want to tell anybody. It sounds like I’ve lost my mind, or something.”
“It’s okay,” Brick said, his voice soft and comforting.
She swallowed and took her hand back, nervously pulling at her shirt.
“I had to leave our date early.” She leaned into Brick maybe, Skid suspected, so she didn’t fall over. Beverly had gone from normal to scared shitless faster than Scooby and Shaggy. “I didn’t want to. I was having a really good time, but my editor called me to a house fire. It was a big one, too. A total loss. It was one of those big 1920s mansions on Independence Avenue. The thing is—” She stopped again, her voice starting to shake. “I drove by the house on the way here tonight, and it was there. It was still there. The whole thing. There weren’t even signs of a fire.”
Brick put an arm around her shoulders. He winced as if worried she’d shrink away, but she didn’t. Beverly melted into him.
“Are you sure it was the same house?” he asked.
“I’m positive. I’d be a pretty shitty reporter if I couldn’t get details like that right.”
The day grew darker, just for a moment, as a cloud drifted over the early evening sun. A chill crept through Skid. She didn’t like it. Not one bit.
“There’s more,” Beverly said, her voice stronger. “I checked the paper’s website when I pulled in here tonight, and the story I wrote was missing. I logged a story Friday night, but it was about an armed standoff with police at a QuikTrip not far from that house. I didn’t write that story.”
A whistle turned them toward the front steps of the Sanderson Murder House, where Cord stood, holding open the door.
“Are you coming?”
11
The sound of people walking outside the door pulled Dave from sleep. He now hated waking up; he never knew when someone would steal his shoes. He wiggled his toes on the opposite end of the couch. They moved in filthy socks.
“I don’t have any shoes.”
Reality sifted through his brain, pushing out sleep and leaving things he didn’t want to remember. The super collider. The machine shed. Nineteen-eighty-two. Grandpa Sam. The Sanderson house. A weight lay across him. Nothing physical, just the weight of the universes. It was the plural part that got to him.
Karl’s equations were the cause; they had to be. When Dave saw Karl’s final report Friday, he’d known the danger of dimensions intersecting. Multiple universes connected as Miller Waves ripped temporary paths through them could cause anything to jump through. Anything. A side effect were time slips. He’d already experienced that. But what of other Daves? Other Karls? Good God, another Skid? They were out there, somewhere.
Standing seemed harder than he remembered as he forced himself to his sock feet. His mouth seemed dirtier, but that could be because of all the beer, or
the time travel, or not brushing his teeth. He steadied himself on the desk next to the couch and took in the room. The guy who now owned the house had taken him to an office in the back of the building and put him on a modern leather sofa that didn’t go with the ’80s decor at all.
“This is my office,” Cord had told him. “Someone will be back to check on you. Don’t vanish. Unless you want to vanish and reappear in the hallway at about 8:25 tonight, then that’d be great.”
Windows filled the walls, and a four-bladed fan hung from the ceiling. This was the Sandersons’ sunroom. Tommy had a TV and Atari 2600 in the corner across from the chair where Cecilia liked to drink screwdrivers and read Jackie Collins novels late in the afternoon. The Atari and the chair, and Tommy and Cecilia, were long since gone.
“I gotta stop this,” he said aloud in the room.
The air suddenly changed, growing thick like Dave had just stepped underwater. A smell, the smell of fresh air flooded his nostrils. He grabbed the desk to brace himself as the windows buckled without breaking, flowing outward in impact waves as if a T-Rex were nearby. “Oh, no,” he whispered. “This is a big one.”
12
The lights weren’t on because there was no need; the sun would still be up for two hours. But when the tour needed them, every light fixture in the house was ready to offer 60 soft-white watts of ghost-hunting illumination. When the Sandersons lived in the house, they probably used 100-watt bulbs like normal people, but Cord felt 60 watts provided just the right amount of mood lighting to get the proper feel of the place. It’s the little things that count.
“And here,” Cord said, car salesman mode in full gear, “is the kitchen where Cecelia Sanderson made her award-winning pies.”
Skid leaned against the counter, arms crossed. “What kind of pies?”
Annoyance flashed across Cord’s face for a second, only a second. “She was particularly fond of berries.” The salesman smile returned. “And this,” he said, stepping to the sink, “is where Delbert Sanderson came to wash off the blood of his family.”
So You Had to Build a Time Machine Page 10
