So You Had to Build a Time Machine

by So You Had to Build a Time Machine (epub)

  Tamara did something she didn’t quite understand. She stood and faced the group. She didn’t know why, but she thought of these people as her group. She’d been there/done that. “Wait. I know you paid for a ghost tour and Cord’s not here to give you one, but there must be a good reason.”

  She bit her bottom lip as conflicting thoughts collided in her head. She pushed apart the bushes around the front door but didn’t find what she was looking for.

  “I have to go around back.” She raised her hands. “Wait. Just a minute.”

  She scuttled past a green water hose hanging in loops around a tin rack next to a faucet and a garden gnome grinning at her from beneath a bush. She bent down, searching. Still nothing.

  The back door sat silent, locked and unwelcoming.

  “You gotta be here,” she mumbled, poking through the bushes growing on either side of the four-step back entrance. Then she saw it—a rock that wasn’t a rock. She picked up the fist-sized lighter-than-advertised faux stone and turned it over, opening a sliding door with her thumb. “Bingo.”

  Thirty seconds later, Tamara Hooper opened the front door of the Sanderson Murder House and let everyone in.

  5

  The trees looked normal enough. Brick said they were elm, hickory and maple with an occasional fir thrown in just to keep things interesting. Skid was just happy the tops were green, the bottoms were brown and not one tried to attack them like those asshole trees in The Wizard of Oz. Cord gathered firewood as Brick cleared a spot down to the dirt and made a ring of fist-sized stones he pulled from a nearby creek.

  “Were you a Boy Scout?” Skid asked as she sat, leaning into a tree and hugging her knees.

  Brick shook his shaggy head, gently piling dried moss and last fall’s leaves into the center of the stones.

  “No. I just read a lot.” Small sticks the size of chopsticks came next, followed by pencil-sized, then pieces as thick as Brick’s thumb.

  “I’ve been thinking about the Klingons,” he said, not looking up from his task.

  Skid picked up a stick from the base of the tree and tossed it into the woods before she realized they could have used it.

  “I haven't,” she said. Brick’s demeanor had changed since Dave had gone waltzing off into time and space. He’d become excited, jittery, like he knew something was coming. Something big.

  Cord walked into the small clearing under the shade of an ancient tree none of them knew the name of. He knelt and stacked his armload of branches next to the ring of stones.

  “Klingons?” he said, holding up a branch like a pistol. “You mean, ‘You are without honor,’ ‘Pew, pew’ Klingons? Like from Star Trek?”

  Brick stopped arranging the tinder and glared at Skid, her face unreadable. “You haven’t given any thought to them?” He swung a stick like a baton. “You should. Why would fictional creatures, as real as you or me, suddenly show up to run a restaurant under your apartment?”

  Skid waved him off. “Many people need a second job these days.”

  “Klingons?” Cord said, dropping to the ground, legs crossed, his head pivoting from Brick to Skid. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “That's it exactly,” Brick said to Skid, gently placing the stick he held into the fire pit before rummaging in his explorer’s pack. “Why would Klingons need a second job? They don't exist. Or do they?"

  “They don't,” Skid said through a grimace. The simple act of building a campfire in this strange place was somewhat comforting. She didn’t want to talk about Klingons.

  “Right.” Brick was really building steam now. He pulled out a small tin box and slid it open, removing pieces of flint and steel. “In our reality, they don't exist, but what if they do in some other reality? What if the writers who think up things like Klingons, murderous clowns, killer robots from the future, or pixies that poop magical fairy dust, didn’t come up with these monsters out of whole cloth? What if creative types unknowingly see into other dimensions, thinking it’s just their imagination, but they really copy monsters that are already real?”

  Cord pushed himself closer to Skid. “Shut up, dude.”

  “But now,” Brick continued, eyes blazing in the fading sunlight as he clicked the flint and steel together, a few pitiful sparks dancing from the friction, “thanks to Dave and that Karl guy, those dimensions can touch, and things from there can bleed through to here. There might really be Klingons in your apartment building and a Predator may out there—” he waved an arm toward the deeper part of the shallow woods “—watching us right now.”

  “I do not like this conversation,” Cord said, taking a Bic lighter from his pocket and setting the leaves and moss on fire. “It’s making me uncomfortable.”

  The tinder blazed. Sticks, small and large, crackled in the heat.

  “Goddammit,” Brick said, then laid a few of the dry branches Cord had collected atop the growing fire.

  6

  The David on the monitor now only had one leg. Dr. Chet Hahn from Dimension Nightmare had slowly, methodically, surgically, sliced the meat from the bones. The monster’s clipping at the flesh surrounding the tibia and fibula reminded Dave of wing night at the bar in Peculiar. He laughed when that point worked its way into his head, but by then he’d consumed a lot of beer.

  “Got anything to eat around this joint?” Dave said, his words louder than he intended. “I’m hungry enough to eat all the way up to my femur.”

  He could see the disappointment in Karl’s face. The lead scientist at Lemaître Labs wanted to break Dave, to make him weep, maybe. To make him beg, definitely. But Dave wasn’t having any of it.

  Karl stood, his shoulders square and stiff, and walked to a panel next to the refrigerator. He reached inside, pulled out a bag of something and threw it overhand at Dave. A sack the size of a baseball hit him in the chest with a crinkly whack before falling into his lap.

  “Hey, peanuts,” Dave said, picking up the packet and fighting to open it with his beer-clumsy fingers. “You know, if this whole scientist thing doesn’t work out, you could always vend at Kauffman Stadium. Royals fans would just love you. Peanuts. Pretzels. Psychopath. Peanuts. Pretzels. Psychopath.”

  Karl stomped toward Dave, who didn’t move, and slapped his feet off the table.

  “You know what your problem is, Collison? You never take anything seriously. Nothing.” The man’s hands were pinched into fists Dave was sure he’d never used before, and he pushed air through his nose like a bull ready to gore a matador.

  “You mean like Friday when I told you flat out, flat the hell out, that your equations would result in the insane catastrophic bullshit that’s happening now?” He finished the bottle of beer he held and stood, pulled his arm back, and threw it into the giant television screen. The bottle shattered, some of the shards clacked as they rattled across the top of the desk, foam leaked down the monitor, but didn’t fog the picture.

  “Generals come in here who don’t like it when they don’t get their way,” Karl said, his voice more under control. “Anything expensive to replace is shielded by bulletproof glass.” He paused for a moment, regarding Dave with cold eyes. “You told me what I hoped to hear. I needed this to happen. What you call ‘catastrophic bullshit,’ I call a presidential cabinet position.”

  “You did what you were instructed to do,” Dave said over the top of him. “Open portals to other dimensions, other times, maybe even the women’s shower room on the second floor.” He stopped, hoping to get more anger from Karl. It wasn’t enough. “What happens now? What happens when everything cycles through, and these temporal and dimensional shifts don’t stop. What then, Mr. I Got My Ph.D. From A Directional University?”

  Karl retucked his shirt, shoving the tail in the back with a flat hand and yanking at his belt before coughing and holding his head up, chin high.

  “First, fuck you. Second, fuck you. And third, fuck you.” He picked up the full be
er bottle Dave hadn’t gotten to and threw it against the bulletproof glass that covered the screen. The bottle, spraying beer, hit with a thunk and dropped to the floor whole, vomiting foamy liquid over the tight, gray carpet. On the screen, the mantis began to work on the other David’s right arm.

  “Hey, I was still drinking th—”

  “What happens,” Karl said, walking calmly back to the refrigerator to pull out another beer, cracking off the cap and taking it to Dave, “is nothing. It’s going to work. This experiment has revealed to me that there aren’t just the ten dimensions, or eleven dimensions, or twenty-six dimensions, or whatever number string theory mathematicians predict. There’s an infinite number. Infinite. And now—” He grabbed the arms of Dave’s chair. “Now? Our people. Ours, are going to have the power to reach into those dimensions and pluck out what they want. And if that doesn’t work, they can go back a day, a week, a year, one hundred years, and try again. We’re the masters of space and time.” A grin, the grin of a horror movie clown, crossed his face. “I’m the master of space and time.”

  It took effort for Dave to pry Karl’s fingers from his chair, but when Karl realized his face was inches from Dave’s, he let go anyway and walked back to the lectern.

  “That is impressive,” Dave said. “Now I know your motivation, your goal, the—” he sniffed. “Wait, have you eaten Cheetos today?”

  This took Karl off guard. “No.”

  “Right, as I was saying, now that I know the reason you don’t smell like Cheetos, and that you enjoy watching me being eaten by a boss from a 1950s sci-fi movie—” he stood, his legs wobbly from all the beer—“could you let me go? There are some people I was hanging out with on the outside, and they may be in trouble. I’d like to find them. One was this really cute girl who wants to kill me.”

  “She can’t be the first.”

  7

  The mantel clock in the living room of the Sanderson Murder House ticked away and Cord hadn’t returned.

  “This sucks,” the guy in the KCFD T-shirt said.

  Most of the people who’d paid for the tour stayed. At about 8:15, the man in the business suit announced he was going to get his “damn money back” and stormed out of the house, trying to slam the screen door behind him. It didn’t work. Two people agreed immediately and followed him out. Two more waited about five minutes before leaving. The rest stayed. The mother and her son, the nurse, and the tall woman who never smiled, among them. The guy in the fire department shirt just thought things sucked.

  “Do you know when he’s going to get here?” he asked Tamara.

  Tamara resigned herself to the fact that she hadn’t gotten Cord’s phone number, and she’d been the one to let them all in. It was now her tour. “I don’t know,” she said, standing and walking to the window, the sun gone, the glow of the streetlights and neighboring houses painting the night outside gray. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon. And it’s worth it. Believe me, I’ll never forget Friday night, ever.”

  “Is that when Tommy Sanderson appeared in the hallway?” a plump young man asked. He leaned against the wall drinking a Pepsi Tamara was sure he’d taken from Cord’s refrigerator and hadn’t paid for.

  “Yes. The lights on the EMP, EMCEE, EMF, whatever meter went all crazy, the hallway made a crackling sound and smelled like someone had just sprayed Febreze.” Tamara stopped, realizing everyone in the room was now staring at her. “Then Tommy Sanderson fell right out of the air and landed in the hallway.”

  An ‘ooooh’ came from somewhere in the room.

  “Here,” Tamara said, pulling out an icebreaker from every college class she’d ever taken. “While we wait, let’s introduce ourselves. When I point to you, please give us your name, where you’re from, and why you’re here.” She almost asked what year they were in but caught herself. She pointed at the guy in the KCFD shirt, who smiled and nodded.

  “Garry Hawkins, originally from Orrick, Missouri,” he said, his voice deep, but friendly. “I watch all those ghost shows on cable. I just wanted to see one for myself.”

  The nurse was next. “Carrie Franklin. I was here on Friday when the fireworks happened, like Tamara.” She waved at Tamara and mouthed ‘hi.’ “I’m from Independence, and I saw the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life right in this house. I haven’t been able to think about anything else since that night.”

  Tamara smiled at her. The nurse’s testimony the sort of thing a witness says to convince a jury. They’ll stay. She pointed at the tall woman next, whose frown deepened.

  “I’m Susan Meek,” the woman said, the reluctance to talk clearly audible. She crossed her arms and glared at Tamara. “My last name was Sanderson in 1984. I was away at college on September 19 when my father killed the rest of my family in this house.”

  8

  The lights under the big top had the same pull on Skid as a bug zapper had to a moth. The glare, the crowd, the heat, the tension in the air. Skid could do without the smell of elephant poop but knew it was part of the package. She straddled her motorcycle, a small one, a Honda CS90, propping it up with her leg as a kickstand. Her heart pounded as if she’d sprinted across the midway, but all she’d done for the past five minutes was sit.

  Randall R. Roe smiled his ringmaster smile as he walked toward her, his top hat in hand, dressed in a sleek, black tuxedo that had begun to shine from wear, although the audience couldn’t tell from a distance.

  I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this, ran through her head at a speed too fast to clock. She couldn’t look at her father as he approached, her wide eyes superglued to the scene before her. Two ramps sat in the middle ring, just high enough for her to drive under if she bent low over the handlebars. On either side of the ramps were runways that stretched outside the tent, the big canvas flaps pulled back and held in place by bungees. Outside the tent to her right was Jimm-Jimm the Daredevil Clown. His real name was Patrick Moon from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, but that didn’t matter. He always went by Jimm-Jimm whether he was in makeup or not. The clown sat in his miniature VW Beetle, the roof reinforced to hold the weight of Svetlana, the Roe Bros.’ dancing Siberian brown bear. The runways were for Jimm-Jimm to pick up enough speed for the little car to launch through the air with a bear on the roof and land, the momentum carrying the spectacle out of sight. The Beetle wasn’t supposed to take a header on top of the motorcycle because the weight of the engine was in the back, but she didn’t care. She was scared shitless.

  “You can do this, honey,” Randall said, calm and soft, his microphone switched off and behind his back for good measure. “Just like in practice.”

  “But—”

  He rested a white-gloved index finger on her lips and smiled again, but this smile wasn’t real, she knew. She’d seen his real smile before, and this wasn’t it. “Just like in practice. I know the stands were empty then, but that doesn’t matter. You’re on the same bike in the same ring with the same car with the same bear. You can do this.” He pointed behind him, his eyes never leaving hers. “These people paid to watch you drive this motorcycle.”

  “But—”

  The smile that was not a smile faded. “The success of this night is all up to you, kiddo,” he said, then patted her back and walked away, raising his arms to the crowd. The ring erupted in applause.

  But I don’t want it to be all up to me.

  That night followed her everywhere, even into other dimensions.

  She never moved, still sitting with her back to the tree. She’d dozed some, but now watched as the wood Cord had gathered burned down to embers, the red glow hypnotizing. Cord lay on a bed of dried leaves Brick had inadvertently made when he cleared a spot for the fire pit. Brick slept on his bedroll, the explorer’s pack more practical now than it had seemed yesterday on the floor of Dan’s Daylight Donuts.

  She hadn’t thought of the crash that hard in years.

  “Hey.”

/>   Skid looked. Brick’s eyes were open, and he was studying her.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  No. She wiped the short sleeve of her shirt across her eyes and snorted, sucking back her runny nose before hocking it onto the embers. “Fine. I’d rather be home watching a baking show with a couple of people and a bottle of wine that would help me ignore them.”

  Brick sat up, his hairy face awash with concern.

  Stop it, Brick. Just stop it. Don’t care for me.

  “Are you crying?” he asked, but his voice didn’t sound accusatory like she’d expected. The strong don’t cry, Randall Roe had told her when she broke her favorite doll, when she laid the CS90 flat on the elephant poo-covered middle ring of the circus as Svetlana and Jimm-Jimm sailed overhead and landed perfectly, when her mother ran off into the night and didn’t even leave a note.

  “No,” she said flatly, then wiped her sleeve across her face again. “Yes, I am. I’m allowed.”

  “Of course you are.” Brick leaned his elbows on his knees. “Do you need a hug?”

  Skid took in a deep breath and cracked her shoulders. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “It’s okay to have emotions, Skid.”

  This brought a slight grin. “Tell that to my father.”

  Brick smiled. Not a Randall Roe smile, but a real smile, an honest smile. She relaxed. A thin reed of breath escaped her lips.

  “From the day I met you, you’ve seemed guarded, like you didn’t want to let anyone into your life,” he said.

  “That’s accurate.”

  “I felt like that toward Beverly, for a while.” He paused, closed his right hand over his left. “We met through a dating site. I didn’t know anything about her except from her profile and picture, and those are usually lies. I once went on a date from one of those sites with a girl named Jayna who told me she ate her sister’s placenta.”

  “What?”