The Curiosity Killers

by K W Taylor

  “Because that’s who I am.” Violet pounded her chest. “I solve crimes.” She picked up the book with the woodcut of her mother in it. “I wanted to know what I came from, but that’s…that’s a long-term issue. That’s not who I am today. You people took away who I am today.” She looked around the room. “I didn’t understand the magnitude of agreeing to that part.”

  “What was it?”

  Violet looked at her father. “What?”

  “What was the crime you solved?” Michael grinned. “Hey, I don’t think you got your mystery-loving skills from some dead white lady. You got that from me, from watching old crime shows on the internet with your old man.”

  Violet relaxed slightly and moved toward Michael. “D.B. Cooper,” she said. “I wanted to find out who he was.”

  Michael looked impressed. “No shit? Nice. Who was he?”

  Violet turned to Ben and noted the pleading look on his face.

  “Can’t, Pop,” she finally said, still keeping her eyes locked on Ben. “It’s classified.”

  Ben leaned against the corner of the desk to steady himself.

  “But apparently my real identity isn’t, not anymore,” she continued. “So I need the full scoop.” She took a step back to Ambrose. “Finish talking, Mister Richards.”

  ~

  In the kitchen, Violet helped Ben bring in empty teacups and plates with the remains of cookie crumbs skittering across their surfaces. “Thank you,” he told her.

  “For what?”

  “For not telling your dad what you learned.” He filled the sink with water. “Why didn’t you tell him? It’s a good story, even if it’s not like the co-pilot was famous or anything. It was a good scheme, and if Mike’s a crime buff, he would’ve loved hearing about how the guy pulled it off.”

  Why didn’t I tell? Was it because it would’ve spoiled Pop’s own theorizing over the events himself? It wasn’t like it was his favorite unsolved mystery or anything. So what harm would it have done to tell him?

  “Maybe I still will, someday,” Violet said. She spotted a bottle of dishwashing soap on the counter and squeezed a dollop into the filling sink. “But not today.”

  Part IV: The Ripper

  There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. –Mahatma Gandhi

  Friday, July 30, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

  Ambrose told the others the last time he saw Wheaton. “I was still warily aligned with Florence. We needed to send a frequent time traveler to this other place, acquire some of their technology,” he said.

  “I met him at a tearoom. He was on his way here.” Ambrose relayed the events of a few weeks prior.

  “Just remember: we can’t promise your extraction at all. You may need to rely on being able to return to the agency via their extraction means.” Ambrose scribbled a note on a napkin and slid it across the table to Wheaton. “When you return, meet me at this address and we’ll arrange the transfer of funds. But we need something tangible, usable, or at least detailed information. We won’t pay for nothing. This isn’t one of your usual vacation excursions with them.”

  Wheaton shook his head. “My usual vacation excursion with them is to a spa in Maine.”

  “First of many lies they’ve told you, mate. You’ve been time traveling every couple of months or so for several years.”

  Wheaton drew back. “I…no. Wouldn’t I…no.” He shook his head. “Last time I was at the spa, I have a distinct memory of…”

  Ambrose grinned. “That’s just it, innit? You don’t have a distinct memory of those trips at all, do you?”

  Wheaton groaned. “I’ve been paying them to do this to me. Mucking up my brain? Exposing me to these atomic whatsits you’re talking about?”

  Ambrose nodded. “Given all that, what’s a little sleeping with the enemy if you can get some remuneration for your pain? All the ways you’ve been deceived?”

  “And this trip? The memory?”

  “You’ll keep,” Ambrose said. “So choose your mystery wisely, ’cause I’m afraid it’ll be the last one you’ll get to solve.”

  “That was it,” Ambrose said. “I don’t know where he decided to go after that, and then everything started falling apart with Florence.” He shook his head. “I’m done with him, done with it all. I would hope Wheaton’s done with it all as well.”

  Ben and Vere exchanged a look.

  “Is he?” Ambrose asked. “Done with it, I mean?”

  Silence.

  “Well, if you can’t tell me that, what mystery did he want solved?”

  “A rather mundane one, if you ask me,” Ben replied. “And only Mister Wheaton ever knew whether or not he was truly successful in solving it.”

  Saturday, September 12, 1136, Woolpit, Suffolk, England

  He heard the wolves before he found the pits.

  Wheaton materialized in a forest, birds twittering overhead and the smell of damp moss heavy in the humid air. There came a low howling and he started, forgetting for a moment that the town’s original name—from even earlier than this medieval time—was “Wolf Pit,” that the citizens made their trade from trapping the most pervasive of species.

  Wolves.

  For their meat, skins, teeth, fur, and sometimes as companions, Woolpit made good trade with other towns and smaller villages throughout this part of Suffolk. Wheaton remembered it all in a flurry of sinking back into his senses from the trauma of the trip—the feeling of free fall, the sense that his very structure was being torn apart and reassembled, all of which he now imagined was more than a little like transforming from human to werewolf, if such a thing weren’t the stuff of fairytales.

  I’m here for a fairytale, in fact.

  From his research, he knew the children should be sequestered at the home of the local doctor, or what passed for doctor, barber, dentist and veterinarian in these primitive times. He set off toward the sound of the wolves, knowing the town would be just beyond.

  I hope my clothes are right enough they won’t think me one of the fae as well.

  The pits were impossible to miss, with wide-spaced posts and crude signs fencing them off such that humans were warned but unwary beasts might still wander in under the slender starlight. The howling subsided as Wheaton passed. He dared a quick glance down in the dark depths of one and spotted a creature small enough to be mistaken for a husky pup. For a brief instant, he felt a pang of longing to rescue the thing, but he shook off the impulse and proceeded.

  With the money the Rénartians are giving me, I can rescue twenty dogs back in my own time.

  The town was now in sight, larger and more bustling than he’d imagined. Men and women in rough-sewn cloth rode carts drawn by horses. Children rode ponies. And everywhere were the scents of sweat and open sewer, though no one save Wheaton seemed to take note of the mingled stench. He coughed once, urging down a slick ribbon of bile. If he couldn’t even stomach the air, this whole endeavor would be nigh impossible, he knew. He tightened his abdominal muscles and forced himself forward.

  Wheaton ambled up to a vegetable cart staffed by a young man, wan and shabbily dressed. “By your pardon, lad. Is the physician near?”

  The boy gestured to his throat and shook his head, then to one ear and nodded. He then pointed across the straw-lined path to a stone cottage with a square of wood on the door. Though the lettering was too far to read, Wheaton suspected it announced the services of the dweller within. “Many thanks,” he said. He thought of buying a carrot from the boy but knew he needed to conserve his coins as best he could.

  As he approached the door, the lettering came into focus; there was a name next to a crude drawing of a snake coiled around a staff. Wheaton rapped on the weathered door. A ruddy-faced woman in a flat white cap opened it.

  “Aye?”

  “God’s blessings.” Wheaton took off his own cap and bowed low. “Pray, is the physician within?”

  She squinted at him. “Surely you heard
of the young travelers what got in this morning,” she said, “and knew Doctor Terric took them in to examine.”

  Wheaton’s heart sped up. It couldn’t be this easy—today was an estimate of when the children were supposed to appear. When Jonson assisted with his research, they hadn’t been able to determine much beyond a season (late summer, just before harvest) and location. But to think they’d appeared this morning?

  The woman was still staring at Wheaton. He shook his head. “Aye, that is the cause of my visit,” he said. “I heard them described and thought they resembled my kin, a niece and nephew who fell into a well in Bury Saint Edmunds on holiday. My sister thought her children lost forever.”

  Wheaton stepped upon the cottage’s threshold stone, but the woman held her hand out, not quite pressing against his chest. “I’ll ask kindly that ye step back, sire.” She set her own foot beside Wheaton’s. She was stout, though shorter than Wheaton, with powerful arms well muscled from tending to all the duties a twelfth-century home required. “These children are no innocent babes. Did ye not hear of their faces, their hands? Did ye not know they weren’t speaking nothing resembling a language the likes of anything in Suffolk? These cannot be your kin.” She looked around at the passers-by walking behind Wheaton, then leaned forward and pitched her voice low. “Methinks they’re like to be from the devil himself.”

  “The wee things don’t speak as we do,” Wheaton said, “most because their father is a Fleming, and they have heard a good four different languages since birth.” He laughed. “The two are so small, they’re not clear on whether to speak Dutch or—”

  “It isn’t Dutch,” came a deep voice behind the woman. She turned and looked backward into the darkened anteroom, opening the door wider as she did so. Wheaton took the opportunity to step across the threshold stone.

  “It isn’t?” Wheaton asked.

  Doctor Terric came into view, a spare man of middle age in a coarse chambray shirt with a tie winding around a slender throat. He wore a leather apron, upon which he now rubbed his hands before holding one out to Wheaton. “May we be acquainted, sire?”

  Wheaton shook the doctor’s hands. “Braiden Welty,” he said. “As I told your woman, I am visiting from Bury Saint Edmunds to see the children your town discovered. I believe myself to be their uncle.”

  “News travels quickly,” the doctor said. He nudged the woman. “Eveline, let him in. He shall see soon enough they belong to no man or woman of earth.”

  “Doctor, we know this man not and have no one to vouch for him.”

  Terric took Eveline by the shoulders and steered her out of the way of the door. “Madame, if it gets these creatures out of our sight, I would endeavor to find them a home with anyone. Please.” He opened the door wider to permit Wheaton entry.

  The doorway was cut small, and only upon needing to duck did Wheaton realize how much shorter the doctor and his housekeeper were than his own six-foot frame. He wasn’t freakish by comparison—no kids would have accused him of being a giant—but were he to be a native of the time, he would have still been remarkable.

  I have all my teeth, too, Wheaton noted to himself, spying Eveline’s jack o’lantern mouth. Would have been quite the catch back here.

  As he followed Terric into an inner room of the cottage, he reminded himself he was only partly here to solve this mystery; he still needed to find the portal for the Rénartians.

  But I have to see them. Just once. Even if I can’t figure out for myself what they are, who they are, I have to see them…

  They were smaller than he’d imagined, huddled up together on a rosewood bench. They were indeed not what modern explanations gave them to be—foreign, malnourished, or con artists. They weren’t Flemings at all, nor were they from the next village over. While he doubted Eveline’s assessment that they were devils or demons or some other nebulous evil, he knew they weren’t of this earth or this time.

  For these children were hairless, not shorn to stubble but smooth about the head, sans eyebrows and lashes. The famous green pallor Wheaton imagined from all the stories was in fact not a tinge due to poor diet but bright, fluorescent green, the green of neon and cars and acrylic paint; a vivid, artificial, far-flung future green impossible to create from the resources of medieval England.

  Their clothing, too, was impossible. These weren’t the tattered but recognizable vestments from Eastern Europe or Wales. These were silver lamé jumpsuits, so ridiculously 1950s B-grade science fiction movie that Wheaton almost let out a high-pitched giggle. These kids were only missing bobble-round clear helmets to complete the look of cliché aliens.

  Except that aliens weren’t cliché here and now, of course, and so they were fairies or demons or worse.

  Ambrose told Wheaton that the Beta universe he sought was full of things Earth took to be cryptids. Why couldn’t it also be home to what Earth thought were little green men from Mars?

  I may have just killed two birds with one stone. These kids might be able to lead me to the portal.

  “There you are,” Wheaton sang out. He took one child by each hand, expecting them to flinch and being relieved when they didn’t. “Your mum is going to be right chuffed.” He turned to Terric. “These are my kin, indeed.”

  “Then you’re kin to the devil,” Eveline cried. She tugged at Terric’s sleeve. “Have them all put in the pillory.”

  Terric shook his head. “We do not well know the ways of other counties, let alone other nations,” he replied. “Let them be.” He nodded toward the still-open door. “Off with you lot, though. I beg you to pardon our superstitious ways here, but Woolpit will be glad to be gone with you.”

  “Ni volas iri hejmen.”

  Wheaton felt the children’s hands clutch his tight, and his body went rigid. He looked down at them. One—he took it to be the girl, as her face was narrower, her eyes larger and somehow more feminine—was looking up at him, glints of moisture in the corners of her eyes. “Hejmo,” she said. “Bonvolu. Hejmo.”

  “You see? A devil tongue,” Eveline said. She tutted. “They haven’t graced us with much speech since their arrival, but when they have, it has been that.”

  “Our scholars couldn’t parse it,” Terric said.

  Wheaton pondered the cadence. “Hej…mo?” he tried.

  The girl relaxed and nodded. “Vi prenas al ni hejme?”

  “It’s their Flemish dialect of Dutch,” Wheaton said. “My distant relatives come from even farther afield, and as such odd words have entered our familial lexicon.”

  Eveline and Terric exchanged a look.

  I have to get them out of here before I’m burned at a stake as well.

  “Many thanks for their good care,” Wheaton said, steering the children to the door. “God be with you both.”

  The three of them were barely through the threshold when the heavy wood slammed shut behind them. From inside, there were muffled tones that Wheaton took to be Eveline’s great relief at being rid of the children.

  “Right,” Wheaton said, tugging the boy and girl along toward the forest. “I can’t speak it, but I recognize what you’re doing there. Esperanto.”

  The boy struggled a bit against Wheaton’s hand and managed to pull away. “Esperanto!” he cried. He hopped up and down. “Komprenas?”

  “Komprenas?” the girl echoed. She, too, wriggled away and looked up at Wheaton with an open-mouthed, hopeful smile.

  “I don’t comprende very well,” Wheaton said, shaking his head, “but your language wasn’t invented back in this time, in this place.” Esperanto was close enough to the bits of various Romance languages Wheaton knew in passing to help him identify it, but its influences were vast and its cognates limited. Perhaps if the children were from an alternate world, similar to this one but not quite, this language developed there on its own as the dominant one in lieu of others with Latin bases. “Eh…I know you two aren’t demons, aren’t fairies, not really. But I need you to take me to your home. Is there a doorway? Door?”
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  The children both frowned.

  Wheaton racked his brain. “Puerta? Porte? Um…porta?”

  The boy, the taller of the two, clapped his hands. “Pordo?” he asked, his eyes lighting up.

  Wheaton shrugged. “I guess, sure, pordo.” He mimicked opening a door and walking through it. “To your home?” He looked at the girl, thinking back to what she’d said in the doctor’s house. If strangers to a strange land wanted to get away, wouldn’t they ask to go home? What had she said? “Hej—”

  “Hejmo,” the girl said. “Pordo a la hejmo.”

  “Yes. Pordo a la hejmo. Where is it?” Wheaton pointed around the edges of the town, pointed to the forest, then held out his hands and shrugged. “Where?” He put his hand at his brow line and mimed shielding his eyes from the sun to look around.

  “Kie.” The boy tugged at the girl’s sleeve and pointed to a spot deep within the forest. “Ni eliris el la arbaro.”

  “Arbaro?” Wheaton pointed to the forest. “Arbor. Tree. Trees? Woods?”

  “Arbaro,” the boy repeated, flapping both arms toward the forest. “Arbaro. Ni eliris el la arbaro hieraŭ.”

  “Pordo to hejmo in arbaro?” Wheaton tried.

  The girl giggled and mimed a mouth with her hand, turning it into a makeshift puppet. “Vi parolas malbone.” She shook her head and mimed the mouth again before pointing to Wheaton.

  “Yes, yes, well, this is my first lesson,” Wheaton said, getting the gist of her criticism of his speaking skills. “Come on, take me to this pordo.” He strode toward the place the boy indicated and beckoned to them to follow, then pointed ahead. “Go on, show me where you arrived.” He placed his index and middle finger on his palm and mimed the fingers walking, then pointed ahead once again, then to the children.