Timescape

by Robert Liparulo

  That made her curious: where was it now?

  She sniffed, said, “I’m just glad you’re all right.” She lifted her face and brushed away the strands of Nana’s hair clinging to it. Then she straightened to her full height, wiping at her eyes.

  Nana smiled at her. She stroked Toria’s cheek and said, “You’re only nine? Are you sure?” She shook her head. “My son certainly raised a fighter.” She gripped Toria by the shoulders to look at her square on. “Toria, thank you.”

  Toria smiled, a little shyly. She didn’t feel like she’d done anything special. What was she supposed to do, watch the house eat Nana? Her eyes shifted to the open antechamber. The skin at the back of her neck tingled. If the doorway was a mouth, she wondered if it had been fed; is that what had made it stop pulling at Nana?

  She spun her head around and saw Keal in the hallway, groaning as he rose to his feet. Where was everyone else?

  “Dad?” she called to the door. “Xander! David!”

  The creature wasn’t screeching anymore, as it had been doing between bites at Dad’s head and neck. Where was it? Where were they?

  Nana was looking from her to the door, back to her. Toria could tell she was getting scared too.

  “Dad!” Toria said.

  A shadow slid over the door frame, and Xander stuck his head out. He frowned at her. “Dad went over,” he said. “David too.”

  “Why?” Toria and Nana said in unison.

  “I guess that creature pulled Dae over. Dad went after him.”

  He looked between Toria and Nana, not at either of them. Toria knew her brother enough to know there was something he wasn’t saying.

  “What else, Xander?” she said. “What happened?”

  “I’ll go,” Keal’s deep voice said behind her. He looked ready to do it, to go do whatever had to be done.

  “No,” Xander said. “I promised Dad we’d wait.”

  There’s that look in his eyes again, Toria thought. He’s not telling everything.

  Keal looked over his shoulder. He stiffened. “Hey, what’s the wheelchair doing up here?” he said. “Where’s Jesse?” He turned wide eyes on them. “Anyone seen him? Jesse?”

  “He was downstairs,” Toria said. “He came to help when Nana started to get pulled away. He tried to stop her from going, but I guess he had to let go.”

  “I thought someone was with him,” Nana said. “When Jesse let go, someone else was there, in the hall. I thought it was you or Eddie. I was so panicked, I didn’t think about it until now.”

  Then it dawned on Toria: “Taksidian!” she said.

  Keal started for the staircase. “Downstairs?”

  “By my bedroom.”

  “Wait!” Xander said, coming out of the antechamber. “He might still be here . . . waiting.” He looked back into the small room. “It can’t change, right? The portal can’t go away until they come back, can it?”

  “I thought you knew that stuff!” Toria said.

  He nodded. “It’ll be okay.” He bit his lower lip. “Just in case, could you and Nana sit in here? Just for a minute?”

  “Xander!” Toria yelled. “It tried to eat her!”

  “Never mind,” he said, starting for Keal.

  Toria grabbed his wrist. “What about Dad and Dae?” she said.

  “I told you—”

  “What else?” She raised her eyebrows.

  His worried look grew deeper, became something like pain. He said, “It was wet and cold over there. I could feel it blowing in, and I saw Dad land in water.”

  Toria nodded. She remembered the bitter chill blowing in when she’d approached the antechamber. He tried to shake off her hand, but she clenched it tighter. She said, “And?”

  “One of the items he took,” her brother said. “It was a life preserver. It had the word Titanic on it.”

  His eyes found Nana’s, and Toria knew what he wanted: he hoped she would say something like, Oh, that old thing? That’s nothing. I’ve seen it before. Leads to a museum.

  Nana didn’t say that. She just stared, her face muscles tight.

  Xander pulled himself free. “I’ll be right back.” And he ran.

  When Keal saw him coming, he disappeared through the landing doorway to shoot down the stairs.

  “Nana?” Toria said.

  “It’ll be all right, dear.” Her eyes were on the antechamber. They didn’t match her words. They said, Maybe it won’t be all right. Maybe nothing will be all right ever again.

  CHAPTER

  eleven

  “We can’t stay here, David,” Dad said. “The ship’s going to break in half any minute now.”

  David’s teeth clattered. His entire body trembled with cold. It felt like he’d been sprayed down and put in a freezer. Dad didn’t look much better. “But, D-D-Dad . . . B-B-Bob!”

  They both looked at it. Smeared, shaky, incomplete.

  “You,” Dad said, “you didn’t draw it?”

  “It w-w-was Mom. Had-had to be.” Or Nana, David thought. Had she ever been here? Had she been putting Bob on things for the same reason they had started do it, to let someone know she’d been there, to help them find her?

  “If it was Mom,” Dad said, “she would have gotten into a lifeboat by now.” He stood, pulling David up with him. “We have to go. When the ship breaks up, it sinks right away. We can’t be on it or even near it.” He tugged David toward the railing. “Hold this.” He gave him a life preserver. “It’s from the house. If we get separated, it’ll lead you to the portal home.”

  David slipped the ring over his cast. He grabbed his father’s life vest, one hand on the sleeve hole, the other on the collar. “Don’t leave me,” he said. His breath turned into a cloud between them.

  “I won’t.” Dad wrapped an arm around David’s waist and lifted him over the railing. “We’ll go together.”

  David kept holding on. It occurred to him that Dad might throw him over, then go back into the ship, looking for Mom. The prospect of being alone in the water with Dad inside a sinking ship, terrified him. But as soon as David was on the other side, his feet on the edge of the deck, Dad stepped over. He looked down. The water was twenty feet below, churning against the ship, rushing onto the decks below them.

  Dad said, “On three . . .”

  CHAPTER

  twelve

  WEDNESDAY, 7:09 P.M.

  Xander moved down the stairs, right behind Keal. The man tromped over the collapsed walls, making them rock and rattle.

  Xander followed, remembering how Phemus—the huge brute who’d taken Mom—had pushed down the walls like they were dominoes. Then he’d come after them—Xander, David, and Toria. If Keal had not come and fought Phemus off, they’d be dead for sure.

  So many close calls. He didn’t know if he should be angry that the house and whatever made it tick were out to get them—or glad that it seemed Someone was protecting them.

  “Jesse?” Keal called and rounded the corner into the main second-floor hallway. “Jesse!”

  Xander felt his spine grow cold. That last call wasn’t an inquiry; it was a cry of anguished concern. In a movie, it was the scream that signaled serious trouble. He didn’t have to see it to know Keal had found Jesse, and it wasn’t good.

  He stopped before he reached the corner. He pressed his palms against the wall, lowered his head, and closed his eyes.

  Breathe, he thought. Just breathe.

  Keal’s footsteps pounded down the hall. “Jesse! Jesse!”

  No reply.

  Xander listened . . . He should be there, helping any way he could—watching out for Taksidian while Keal tended to Jesse. But Xander didn’t want to know what had happened. Yesterday David had said, “We need a break, Xander. Ever since we moved in, it’s been one bad thing after another. Why can’t something good happen for once?”

  He knew now exactly how David had felt. It had taken him a little longer to reach that point, but he was there. Oh man, was he there.

  We do n
eed a break, Dae, he thought. You were right. He realized something: whatever this was he was feeling—a panic attack? a closing down? frustrated paralysis?—it had little to do with the fear of seeing what had happened to Jesse. It wasn’t even brought on by all the things he, Xander, had been through.

  It was David. Xander feared for him, missed him. He was sorry for all the things his brother was going through. In the Mission: Impossible movies, Tom Cruise was too cool to be threatened into action, but as soon as a loved one was in danger, everything changed. Torture was nothing next to someone you cared about being tortured.

  “Xander?” Keal yelled. “Xander!”

  Shake it off, Xander thought. Get tough. You can do it!

  “Xander!”

  Xander pushed off the wall. He staggered, found his feet, went around the corner.

  Keal was leaning over Jesse. The old man was on the floor where a railing separated the hallway from the foyer below. As Xander approached, he saw a red pool spreading out from Jesse’s body.

  Keal glanced up. “I think he’s been stabbed.”

  “Is he—?” Xander stopped.

  Jesse’s eyes were shut, but his mouth hung open. His natural paleness had hued to bluish-white. Veins coursed over his forehead, and age spots covered his bald scalp. The wispy gray hair from his temples and the back of his head fanned out behind him. He looked like a rag doll tossed out with the trash.

  “Is he dead?” Xander stepped over the pool and knelt by Jesse’s hip, across from Keal.

  So much blood, Xander thought. It soaked the old man’s shirt, obscuring the plaid pattern on his shoulder and chest. Xander could smell it now, a little like raw hamburger. For a moment he thought he was going to puke. He swallowed and forced himself to handle it. Sometimes that’s just what you had to do: handle it.

  “He’s got a pulse,” Keal said, “but it’s weak. He’s lost a lot of blood. I have to get him to a hospital.”

  “I’ll call 911.” Xander patted his pants, looking for his phone.

  “No time,” Keal said. He pushed his arms under Jesse and lifted. Jesse’s head flopped back; his mouth yawned wider. One arm dangled.

  Xander grabbed Jesse’s hand. It was bony and felt wrong, unnatural. It was so slick with blood it could have been skinned. He laid it on top of Jesse’s chest.

  Keal carried Jesse down the stairs. His gaze never left Jesse’s face, as though his watching were a lifeline that kept the old man from slipping away. He hit the foyer, effortlessly flung open the door, and rushed out.

  Xander leaned against the newel at the top of the stairs. He wanted to collapse right there, just fall to the floor, curl up into a ball, and pretend none of this was happening.

  No, he thought. Move, start moving. Do something. Anything.

  But he was achy—in his mind and every part of his body.

  Aaahh! He pictured himself screaming like that painting, the long-faced screamer that had become a popular Halloween mask after being used in the Scream movies.

  If I’m feeling this way, imagine how David feels. He was beat yesterday, then all this happens. Taksidian coming at us through the closet, the showdown in the clearing, finding the ruins of Los Angeles—of humankind—and those creatures coming after us. He’s younger than I am, and . . . and I’m here and he’s fighting for his life on the Titanic! Xander, you are such a baby!

  He forced himself to move. Heading for the stairs to the third floor, he glanced back and stopped. Jesse had left a mess on the floor: himself spilled out all over it . . . but something more.

  Xander went back to the blood. A trail of it snaked away, running to the steps and down each one. It wasn’t this that had caught his attention, however. There was something on the floor near where Xander had knelt, where Jesse’s seemingly skinned hand had rested. It was a message, symbols, written in blood:

  Clearly, the first one was a house . . . or a spearhead. Then the letter T, or an ax, followed by . . . SpongeBob’s teeth? Like in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, their survival might depend on figuring out what the pictograms meant. Not that Xander thought for a second that there was anything fun or entertaining about the symbols: he couldn’t imagine what it must have taken Jesse to draw them, stabbed, bleeding out. They must be important, even though they made no sense. He hurried to the room they had dubbed their Mission Control Center, and came back with a pad of paper and a pen. He copied the symbols, trying to be as precise as he could. He did it twice, just to be sure.

  The blood on his hands was sticky. It left his fingerprints in red in the margins of the paper.

  A bloodied document with cryptic symbols from a dying man, he thought. We’re living a movie.

  Two weeks ago, he would have added Yee-haw! But this was a story he didn’t like so much, one of those films that doesn’t end happily and sends the audience shuffling out with long faces.

  He returned to the MCC and dropped the pad on the desk beside the computer monitor. That task completed, his thoughts returned to Dad and David. He needed to be in the antechamber, waiting for their return. He left the room and tromped over the fallen walls. At the base of the stairs, he spotted Toria helping Nana maneuver out of the crooked hallway and onto the landing. He started up, then stopped.

  “Wait there,” he said. “I have to take care of something.”

  “Xander,” Toria said, “Nana needs to lie down.”

  “Gimme a minute. I’ll be right back.” He ran back to Jesse’s blood, pooled and drizzled and smeared on the floor. It would do Toria and Nana no good to see that. He darted into the bathroom and drenched a towel under the tub’s faucet, then dropped it onto the worst of the blood. He swirled it around then carried it, dripping, to the tub. He squeezed it out. He remembered that in Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock had used chocolate syrup for blood because brown looked better in black-and-white than red did. This was red, and it wrenched at his guts more than any horror movie had ever done.

  He went back and forth three more times, swabbing the blood from the hardwood floor. The thin layer of blood that made up the symbols had dried, and he had to scrub to remove them.

  “Xander?” Toria called. She was out of sight, but closer than she should have been.

  “Just a minute,” Xander said. “Stay there!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” He tossed the sopping towel into the tub, then used another towel to wipe up the trail from hallway to bathroom.

  He started back toward them. “Okay.”

  They met at the corner.

  Toria squinted up the hall. “What were you doing?”

  “Just a little . . .” He almost said cleanup, but that would have led to questions he didn’t want to answer. He finished by shaking his head.

  “You don’t look well,” Nana said.

  Xander shrugged. “I’m worried about Dad and Dae.” He looked down. His hands were stained pink, his fingernails outlined in bright red. He put them behind his back.

  “Where’s Jesse?” Nana said. “Did Keal find him?”

  “He was hurt,” Xander said. “Unconscious. Keal took him to the hospital.” Of course, they had to know that much.

  “Jesse?” Toria said, tears instantly welling in her eyes.

  “Oh,” Nana said. “How?”

  Xander shook his head. “Something Taksidian did, I guess.” Their faces were more than he could bear. “I’d better go wait for Dad and David.”

  He tried to smile and was pretty sure it turned out looking like he was sucking on a lemon. He brushed passed them and up the flight of stairs.

  Wait for them? Is that what he’d said? He had no intention of waiting. His brother needed him. Dad too, even if he didn’t know it. Xander wasn’t about to sit on his butt while they drowned or froze to death because of a ship that had gone down nearly a hundred years ago.

  CHAPTER

  thirteen

  “. . . Three!”

  David and Dad jumped. The mist hanging over the
water and all the darkness made David misjudge where the surface was. His feet hit it well before he thought they should. He quickly pulled in a breath, but had only filled his lungs halfway when his head plunged under. Didn’t matter: the iciness of the water made his muscles contract, and he lost all his air in a single sharp exhale. He was hurting now. How far under, he didn’t know, but it felt like fathoms. Black, icy, churning water everywhere. He needed to breathe.

  Then he felt Dad tugging at him, pulling him up. He kicked, kicked, fought the impulse to release his grip on his father’s life vest and paddle. Dad was doing a better job than he could do. He felt the water rushing past him as they rose.

  But oh, he needed air! His chest ached as though a glacier giant had punched his sternum, crushing it.

  He opened his eyes. Blackness everywhere. The ocean salt stung; he felt like someone had rubbed sandpaper over his eyeballs. Water slipped into his mouth, and he breathed it into his lungs. He coughed, tried not to breathe in more of the sea—or throw up.

  He broke surface. Air! Air! But it seemed as much water went in as the sweet stuff his lungs needed. He coughed and choked. His father lifted him, let him cling to his head as David fought to get oxygen in and water out. Slowly, he caught his breath. He realized he was pushing his father under; the life vests of 1912 weren’t the buoyancy rock stars they were in his time. He lowered himself down, off Dad’s head, deeper into the water.

  A white cloth—it might have been a tablecloth or bed-sheet—floated like a drowned ghost beside them. The little girl’s doll Dad had seen on the deck bobbed up and down an arm’s reach away. He felt a lot like that doll: totally helpless, at the mercy of the ocean.

  “I’m freezing,” David said. It wasn’t the kind of cold that was content to brush against your skin. His organs felt cold, his stomach and heart. He imagined his bones becoming brittle with the cold. Something was going to bump into him, and he would shatter.