Timescape

by Robert Liparulo

  “I thought maybe an ax,” Xander said.

  “What’s that?” Toria said, tapping her finger on the third symbol, which could have been buck teeth or, if turned upside down, two buildings on a hill.

  “Antechamber items,” Dad said. “He wants us to find a portal.”

  CHAPTER

  twenty - one

  WEDNESDAY, 9:39 P.M.

  “Yeah,” Xander said. “Three items, that’s what it takes to open the portal. But I don’t remember seeing these things.”

  Dad tilted his head. “They’re always changing, the antechambers, the worlds they lead to. I don’t think we’ve seen half of them, or even a tenth.”

  David sat back. “But why a portal?”

  “Guess we’ll know when we find it,” Dad said.

  “Do you think it has something to do with Mom?” David asked, trying not to get his hopes up.

  “Everything about this house has something to do with rescuing Mom,” Dad said. “That’s why we’re here.”

  “Wherever it leads to, it must be important,” Xander said.

  “A place that will help us.”

  David blew out through his lips. “That’d be a nice change.” But he knew Xander was right. Jesse—despite vowing never to return to the house, despite being ninety-something years old, despite his wheelchair—had come all the way from Chicago to help them. He would have spent his last breath trying to do that.

  “Well,” Xander said. He slapped his palms on the table and stood. “What are we waiting for?”

  “Now?” David said. “You want to find the portal now?”

  “Why not?” Xander said.

  “It’s late. I’m beat. Do you remember the kind of day we had?”

  “Hey, we’ll sleep—”

  “Stop!” David said. “Don’t you say we’ll sleep when we’re dead.” He gaped at his father. “He’s been saying that. He wants to just keep going till we all fall over.”

  “Xander,” Dad said. “David has a point. We need—”

  “We need to get stuff done,” Xander interrupted. “The portal, the MC, fortification, Nana—”

  “Xander,” Keal said. He was calm, but his rumbling voice commanded attention.

  All faces—including Xander’s—turned to him.

  Keal continued: “Not tonight.” He leveled a firm finger at Xander. “You’re exhausted, I can tell. You have to get some sleep. We all do.” He lowered his finger and his eyes. Then he addressed Dad. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk to your boy like that.”

  “No,” Dad said. “Go ahead.”

  David nodded. Keal was in the Special Forces, a military man. What they were saying—about using the MC, going on the offensive—it was military talk. Keal was exactly what they needed.

  Keal pinched the bridge of his nose between his eyes, then rubbed his close-cropped hair. “Here’s the deal, Xander. You’ve had a long, crazy day. Enough action to knock a soldier off his feet. And—”

  “Keal—” Xander started.

  Keal stopped him with a word: “And.” He focused intense eyes on Xander until he was sure the boy was listening. “And I know you guys were up late last night. Jesse and I didn’t leave here until after two in the morning. You gotta be running on fumes. Don’t say you aren’t.”

  He leaned back in the chair. “I learned something about this in officer candidate school. How much sleep soldiers need is a part of wartime strategy. Sleep deprivation happens to soldiers and whole armies. They just keep fighting on, especially if it seems either victory or defeat is imminent.”

  Keal touched his fingers to his head. “What happens is this. The mind gets so exhausted, it wants to shut down. After a while, the brain gives up asking for rest. It pretends to kick into gear again, just to keep up with the body. But sleep deprivation impairs alertness, cognitive performance, and mood. It causes paranoia, hallucinations, faulty thinking. General Patton said, essentially, the idea is not to give up sleep for your country, but to make the other poor guy give up sleep for his.” He paused to give Xander that piercing glare again. “Xander, we need you at your best. You need to sleep. We all do.”

  Xander blinked slowly, then dropped down in his chair. He said, “For how long?”

  “A good sleep,” Keal said. “I insist.” He looked at Dad, who nodded.

  Xander seemed to frown with his whole face. He scowled at David.

  “Don’t think of sleep as downtime,” Keal said. “It’s part of the battle, as important as planning and action.”

  “Fine,” Xander said, rising again. “Let’s get it over with.”

  CHAPTER

  twenty - two

  WEDNESDAY, 10:10 P.M.

  In the foyer, David gave his grandmother a hug. He backed away and glanced at Dad, who stood in the open doorway, waiting to take her to a motel in town.

  She’d gotten up shortly after Xander had stormed off to their bedroom; it was probably his angry clomping that had awakened her. Dad, Keal, and Nana had talked it out and decided she was better off out of the house.

  To Nana, David said, “Are you sure you want to go?”

  She touched her fingers to his face. “I’d rather not leave you, David. We have a lot of catching up to do.” She looked up toward the second floor. “It’s this house that doesn’t want me here. Or I should say, it wants me too badly. It’ll be safer for everyone if I don’t spend too much time here.”

  David turned to Dad. “But I thought . . . you know, the creature . . .”

  “We can’t be sure that was a permanent fix,” Dad said.

  “Will she be safe away from us?” David said. He looked at Toria, who was standing behind Nana, gripping a handful of their grandmother’s skirt. His sister’s eyes were red, and tears still glimmered on her cheeks. “You said Toria can’t go because she’d be safer here.”

  “And I think Nana would be as well, with all of us watching out for each other,” Dad said. “Except for the pull. It wants Nana, not Toria. Any dangers out there can’t be as great as the one here. At least for Nana.”

  “What about Taksidian?” David said.

  “We’ll make sure no one’s following us. We’ll slip her into the room Keal and Jesse already have, so we won’t have to check in anywhere.”

  “And I have my dinner,” Nana said, holding up Toria’s pink High School Musical lunchbox. She smiled back at his sister. “Thank you, Toria.”

  “Why can’t Keal stay with you?” Toria said.

  Nana’s eyes found Keal sitting on the stairs. “I’d feel better if he were here with you. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She returned her gaze to David. “Then we’ll see if I can shed any light on those worlds to help you find your mom. You’ll tell Xander that for me, won’t you?”

  David smiled. “He can debrief you then.”

  She gave him another quick squeeze and Toria a longer one. She and Dad left, and David locked the door behind them. He turned to see Keal pointing at him.

  “Bed,” Keal said. He swung his finger to Toria. “You too.”

  CHAPTER

  twenty - three

  WEDNESDAY, 10:52 P.M.

  David rolled over, scrunching the pillow into a ball under his head. Moonlight coming in the window caught the edges of Xander’s dark figure. He was sitting up in bed.

  “Go to sleep,” David groaned.

  Instead, Xander swung his legs off the bed. “This sucks.”

  “You heard what Keal said. You need to sleep.”

  Xander made a rude noise with his lips. “He doesn’t know me.”

  “Sounds like he knows a lot,” David said. He lifted his head, propped an arm under it. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What do you think of Keal?” David asked.

  “He’s cool.”

  “He’s more than that,” David said. “He’s strong. He was an Army Ranger, so he knows weapons, combat, strategy, tactics.”

  “He’s a nurse now,�
� Xander said, as though that somehow made Keal less of a tough guy.

  David didn’t think so. He said, “Right. Look at what’s happened to us. We’ve been beat up, cut up, pounded on, bashed.”

  “So?”

  “So, he’s exactly what we need. He has all the skills we can use, from fighting to getting patched up. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  “Strange how?” Xander swung his legs around to sit on the edge of his bed.

  “Dad always says coincidence is baloney.”

  “What are you saying?” Xander asked. “That God sent Keal to us?”

  “Exactly the guy we need right now?” David said. “If that’s not God, what is?”

  Xander didn’t say anything.

  David continued. “Remember that verse Mom used to quote when things got tough? Not this kind of tough, but like when she backed into that car and the guy pretended he had whiplash and said he was going to sue? She always said, ‘If God is for you, who can be against you?’ ”

  “Uh, let’s see: Taksidian? Phemus? This house?”

  “It doesn’t mean people aren’t going to try to get you,” David said. “It means they won’t win.”

  “They’re doing a pretty good job,” said Xander.

  “But they haven’t won. Somehow we’ve always gotten away. We’re still in the house. We still have a chance. Now, of all the people in the world, Keal shows up.”

  “Hey,” Xander said, a little too enthusiastically, “maybe he’s an angel. Like you!”

  “I’m not saying that. But it can’t be a coincidence that who we needed is who showed up.”

  “We needed someone to rescue Mom and get us out of this place,” Xander said.

  “Maybe that’s what’s happening. He’s helping us do that.”

  “I meant like that.” Xander snapped his fingers. “Oh, never mind. If God is for us, why did Mom get kidnapped in the first place?”

  David had thought about that and hadn’t come up with an answer. So he said something else he had heard. “Sometimes bad things happen to good people.”

  Xander’s silhouette threw up its arms. “Oh, well . . . which is it, then: is God for us, or is He allowing bad things to happen to good people?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “Mom said sometimes things that look bad are really good. We just can’t see it when we’re in the middle of it.” He expected Xander to cut that down with a snide comment too. When he didn’t, David said, “Well, I think someone up there is helping us.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Xander whispered. They were silent for a while. Then Xander said, “We never finished putting up the camera.”

  “You want to do that now?” David said. “Up there?”

  Xander thought about it. “Maybe not that, but something.”

  “Remember how we used to talk at night? I liked that.”

  “We talked about this house, before we moved in. I thought it was haunted.”

  “Guess you were right,” David said. “Not by ghosts, though. What was it Jesse said, something about Time haunting this place?”

  Xander’s dark form nodded. He said, “We thought this room was spooky.” He laughed. “Little did we know, huh?”

  “It’s still kinda spooky,” David said. “I keep thinking something else is going to happen, and I don’t have any idea where it’ll come from. Look at the linen closet, the way it’s a different kind of portal—to our school, of all places. And it’s down here on the second floor, right outside our bedroom door. Just goes to show, weird stuff can happen anywhere in this house.”

  Okay, he’d just scared himself. He suddenly had the feeling something was watching them from a dark corner of the room. He rolled onto his back, lifted his head, and looked into the shadows by the closet. He scanned around to the corner where the room opened up to the octagon-shaped area in the house’s tower. It was in front of that area’s center window that Dad had been waiting to scare them when they first moved in. David had almost peed his pants.

  Xander said, “You know, as much as we’ve learned about this house, there’s so much more we don’t know.”

  David sat up and scooted back to lean against the head-board: all the better to keep his eye on the entire room. He said, “Like what?”

  “Like why,” Xander said. “Why is it here?”

  “Jesse built it.”

  “I mean, why does it do what it does? What are the portals all about? And that’s just for starters. What’s Taksidian doing with them? Why was Mom taken?”

  White light flared up against Xander, revealing him sitting there in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. David’s breath stopped in his throat. Then Xander swiveled his head toward the window, and David realized that the light was shining through.

  Xander stood and leaned over the nightstand. He pushed aside the thin sheers that covered the window and said, “Dad’s home.” The light went off, and he sat again. “I’m glad Nana’s out. It’s better for her.”

  “Maybe we should all go,” David said. He lifted a glass of water off the nightstand and downed half of it.

  “We can’t risk leaving the house empty,” Xander said.

  “You know that. Taksidian might do something that keeps us out for good. Then we’d never find Mom.”

  They heard the door open, then shut, downstairs. It was more of a shudder that came up through the floor than a sound.

  David finished the water and set it down. He said, “You really think we can find out something about him, about Taksidian? Something that’ll help?”

  “That’s it,” Xander said. “I can look him up on the Internet.”

  “We’re not connected yet,” David reminded him. Their Mac hadn’t come with a modem. They had a broadband modem, but they hadn’t ordered the service yet. A lot of things had fallen through the cracks after Mom got taken.

  “The school is,” Xander said.

  “The . . . You’re talking about going through the linen closet? No, Xander. We promised Dad no more sneaking around. Besides, Taksidian might expect us to do something like that. He’s probably waiting for us at the school.”

  “He’s just a guy, Dae. He can’t be everywhere at once.”

  They heard Dad’s footsteps in the hall. The sound faded as he entered his bedroom.

  Xander stood.

  “He has people working for him,” David reminded him.

  “The watchers.”

  “If he’s all-knowing, all-seeing, he’d have gotten to us by now.” He started for the door.

  “Xander, wait! Do it tomorrow.”

  “Dad says we have to go to school,” Xander said. “Got to keep up appearances, you know? I don’t have computer class, and I won’t be able to get to a computer without people around. Now or never, Dae. Want to come?”

  David crossed his arms over his chest. “No.”

  Xander reached the door. “You sure?”

  “I’ll tell Dad.”

  “No, you won’t.” He turned the handle, cracked the door. A thin line of light sliced the darkness.

  “Wait!” David said. He hopped up out of bed. He was halfway across the room when Xander swung open the door. David squinted against the hallway light, which Dad had left on, and stopped dead in his tracks.

  Keal was sitting in the chair they had propped against the linen closet door. A magazine rested in his lap. He said, “Boys.”

  Xander gaped at him. “What are you doing?”

  Keal flashed a wide grin. “Making sure you get your sleep.”

  Xander swung a stunned gaze at David, who said, “The sleep police.”

  Xander turned back to Keal. “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Good night, guys,” Keal said.

  Xander shut the door. “This sucks,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  twenty - four

  THURSDAY, 1:23 A.M.

  David’s bladder woke him. He considered sleeping through his need but decided he couldn’t. Groggily, he flipped back his blankets
and sat up. Everything ached: his broken arm, his forehead where Xander had conked him with the sextant, the top of his skull where the wall had landed when Phemus pushed it down, his cheek where Phemus had punched it, his palm where he had grabbed Phemus’s obsidian blade, his shoulder where the warrior’s arrow had nicked it in the jungle world, and all of his muscles . . . just because they did. If they stayed in the house much longer, he’d end up one big walking wound.

  In the next bed, Xander snored in a slow, steady rhythm.

  So much for all that stuff Xander said about not getting a wink of sleep, no way, no how, David thought.

  And if Xander hadn’t yapped about going through the linen closet/locker portal to use the school’s computers, David wouldn’t have drunk the water, and he wouldn’t be up now.

  Thanks, Xander.

  Groaning as quietly as possible, David stood. He stumbled to the door and opened it. The hall light was blazing. He shielded his eyes with his hand. Keal was still in the chair. David thought he was staring down at the magazine in his lap, then he realized the man was asleep.

  David stepped into the hall. A floorboard creaked.

  “Whoa! Hey!” Keal said, his head snapping up. He brought up the magazine as if it were a weapon. His eyes focused on David. “What—?”

  “Potty break,” David said. He walked past Keal and into the bathroom.

  Washing his hands, he looked at the boy staring out at him from the mirror. Not the self he knew and loved. This one was almost as pale as the creatures they had seen in the future world. He had dark circles under his eyes. The left side was darker and bigger than the right; it was a true black eye, not just tired. Below it, his cheek was still discolored: red, yellow, blue. The hair on one side rose straight up. He thought, Poor kid, whoever you are. He leaned close. Same hazel eyes. At least that part of him was unchanged.

  He switched off the light and went into the hall. Keal’s chin was touching his chest again.

  Something clanged in the other direction. He looked. The far end of the hallway was dark. The lights in the corridor leading to the third-floor stairwell had shorted out when the walls collapsed. The ceiling down there creaked. A door banged.