Timescape

by Robert Liparulo

  David swung his head around, sure that the sound would have awakened Keal. But no, the man hadn’t budged.

  Wake him, he thought.

  Just a sec.

  In this house, if everyone got up whenever there was a noise, no one would sleep. Ever.

  He stood without moving just outside of the bathroom. The toilet was gurgling softly. He strained his ears to hear past it.

  Something bumped. Definitely. Too quietly to be on this floor. Had to be upstairs.

  Okay . . . so? Last night someone or something had thumped around up there for half the night. That’s why Xander had wanted to install the camera. Whatever had made the noise hadn’t ventured into the main part of the house. David didn’t think so, anyway. They hadn’t opened the master bedroom door, where he, Xander, and Toria were bedded down. But last night two walls had separated the third floor from the second.

  Tonight the walls were gone. Would the thing upstairs take that as an invitation to come down?

  David shook his head. He didn’t even know if it was a “thing.” It could be nothing more than the doors up there opening and shutting. They’d witnessed that before, when the doors ripped off the locks he and Dad had put on them.

  The camera. Xander hadn’t finished mounting it, but it was there, above the doorway between the hallway and the landing.

  David had seen Xander tightening the screws when Phemus and his cohorts had come up behind him. If he could get to the MC, he could take a peek at the monitor.

  But the MC was so close to the stairs, the collapsed walls nearly reached its door. Did he dare get that close?

  He started walking. Slowly. On his toes. He let his arm brush the wall as he moved toward the end of the hall.

  He looked back at Keal. Why not wake him?

  Because I’m not a baby. I’m strong and courageous. Strong and courageous. Could you say you were brave if you never acted bravely?

  He took another step, then another. He was in front of Toria’s open door now. Her night-light filled the room with a faint yellow glow. Her little body barely lifted the blankets off the mattress.

  As he passed the banister, he glanced at the chandelier that hung over the foyer. He remembered the way it had thrown glowing diamonds on the walls when he and Xander had cast their flashlights on it. That was when they had first seen Phemus, standing at the end of hall, watching them.

  His stomach clenched up. The end of the hall wasn’t completely dark. Light from the overheads showed him the far wall. If someone were standing there now, he’d see him. But if someone were standing just around the corner . . .

  Strong and courageous.

  He kept moving. Nearing Dad’s room. Almost to the end.

  This was when people in a movie audience would say, Don’t go there, stupid!

  Dad’s door was open. His father’s breathing was slow and deep.

  Something rattled. David didn’t think it came from the bedroom.

  He whispered, “Dad?”

  Nothing.

  Opportunity number two to get help, David thought. Just say his name louder. Do it.

  He walked past.

  He had a thought: you could never trust noises in this house. What if the sounds he’d heard weren’t coming from upstairs? What if someone was creeping up the main staircase? Or sneaking up behind him?

  He spun around so fast, his cast banged the wall. Keal’s head came up. It slumped down again. No one else in the hall. He could see a bit of the main stairs. No one was looking at him from there.

  He thought he heard Dad mumble. Then the steady breathing resumed.

  Three distinctive sounds reached him: thump-thump-thump.

  Footsteps. He was sure they’d come from upstairs.

  If they were upstairs, then they weren’t down here. He hurried to the corner and peered around it. It was darkest where the walls used to be, farthest from the glow of the main hallway lights. The bottom of the stairs, the only part he would have been able to see, was also pitch-black. But he could make out the edge of one of the steps, maybe the third one from the bottom. The scantest of light was spilling down from the third-floor hallway.

  He tiptoed diagonally across the hall toward the MC’s door. More stairs came into view, each one better lighted as they progressed toward the landing. He slipped into the room. The desk on which the monitor rested was six or eight feet in. He reached it and switched on the monitor.

  Come on, come on.

  The footsteps again. Soft, stealthy.

  The monitor glowed a solid blue. The wireless camera receiver was off. He grabbed the little box and punched the switch. Snowlike static rolled on the screen. When the snow cleared, a face stared out from the monitor at David.

  CHAPTER

  twenty - five

  THURSDAY, 1:30 A.M.

  David jumped. Then he recognized the face and relaxed. It was the wall lamp that depicted a scowling Mongolian-looking warrior. The camera must have been canted toward it; the face appeared to be tilting its head curiously.

  Then a blur flashed across the screen, moving left to right: something had passed the camera, heading for the landing!

  He backed toward the door. He wanted to turn and run, but he couldn’t tear his eyes off the monitor. Nothing else moved on the screen.

  He was at the door. He leaned his head close to the jamb, listening.

  Thump.

  On the landing.

  Thump-thump.

  Something was coming down the stairs.

  David held his breath. No way he could get out of the room now without being seen. He considered his options:

  Hide in the MC. Yell for Dad and Keal. Run for the bedrooms like a man on fire for a lake. He liked that one.

  He bolted out of the room, eyes on the target: the corner where the small corridor made a ninety-degree turn into the second floor’s main hallway.

  His foot caught on a piece of the fallen wall, and he went down. He belly flopped on the floor, knocking the wind out of him and cracking his chin and his cast.

  Thump—the footstep. Creak—on the steps. Close, maybe six steps up.

  David tried to scream, but the air had whooshed out of him and he was fighting to get it back. The only sound he made was a feeble hhhaaa-hhhaaa-hhhaaa, like an old smoker trying to laugh. He rolled onto his side to better see the terror descending the stairs.

  Legs, stepping down, one stair at a time. The light on the stairs came from behind David’s attacker, which cast the legs in shadow. They seemed spindly, spiderlike.

  It was close now, stepping off the bottom stair, in the darkest part of the corridor. A few more steps and it would catch the glow of the main hallway light. David would take to the grave the image of his killer.

  He had delayed too long; the beast was right there. If he tried to scramble away, it would be on him in seconds. Instead he dove toward the creature, to the fallen walls. He swept his hands around over the gritty, plaster-dust-covered slabs. His fingers wrapped around the very thing he had hoped to find: a broken wood stud. He hefted it up. It was three or three and a half feet long. He rose to his knees and jabbed at his attacker.

  The beast let out a high-pitched chirp of a scream.

  David’s arms halted in the process of pistoning back to ram the stud forward again.

  He leaned forward. The beast was still cloaked in shadow, but he noticed it was much smaller than the other people who had emerged from the portals. That, along with the voice he had recognized, made him say, “Toria?”

  “David?” She stepped into the dim light. She wore her favorite frilly nightgown and nothing on her feet. Her eyes were wide with fear. Her bottom lip trembled.

  David tossed the stud aside. He walked on his knees to her and grabbed her shoulders. “What were you doing up there?” He lifted his gaze to take in the staircase, the landing at the top, the light spilling in from the hallway. “Is something up there?”

  “I . . . don’t . . . know,” she said. Little hitches of b
reath separated her words; she was trying not to cry. “You . . . scared . . . me.”

  “I scared you? Are you kidding? I thought . . .” He was disappointed in himself for assuming the lump of blankets on Toria’s bed was her. Probably, if he looked now, he’d wonder how he could have thought she was there. The mind sees what it expects to see, he thought. He said, “What were you doing up there?”

  She swallowed, got her breathing under control. “I thought I heard Mom, David. She was calling me.”

  “Calling you?” David said. A chill tickled the back of his neck. “Are you sure it was Mom?”

  “I think so.”

  The thought of it—of Toria hearing a voice floating to her from upstairs—scared him so much he thought he was going to be sick. He said, “So you just went? You can’t do that.” He gazed again toward the landing. “What happened? What’d you find?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I turned on the lights up there and looked around, but I didn’t find Mom. I started looking in the little rooms, the antechambers, but I got scared. When I was at the top”—she pointed to the top of the stairs—“I saw you, but I wasn’t sure it was you. I was trying to get a closer look, without you seeing me. You know, in case you weren’t you.”

  David scanned his sister’s face. She was only three years younger, and she was pretty smart for her age, thanks to her love of reading, but he’d always thought of her as a lot younger, a baby. Maybe it was because she was the baby of the family, and Mom and Dad sort of doted on her that way, or maybe it was because she was a girl. It scared him silly that she’d wandered up to the third floor by herself—whether or not someone had coaxed her, which he didn’t want to think about.

  He turned aside to listen for movements in the hallway. How could Keal and Dad not have heard Toria’s scream or the stud he’d tossed down? He hoped it was because those noises weren’t as loud as they had seemed to him, or that the two adults were deep in sleep. He didn’t want the house to be messing with the noises: one, it was creepy, and two, it might signal trouble.

  “We have to tell Dad about this,” David told his sister. “You know that, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, let’s . . .”

  A voice stopped him. It was their mom’s, drifting down the stairwell to them: “Toria . . . Toria . . .”

  CHAPTER

  twenty - six

  THURSDAY, 1:34 A.M.

  “See?” Toria said. “Doesn’t that sound like—”

  David clamped his hand over her mouth. “Shhhh.” He squatted, pulling his sister down with him. He kept his eyes on the upstairs landing. He expected shadows to flicker through the light, as whoever was up there moved closer. He stared without blinking for so long, his eyes began to burn. Little dots started to float in from the sides.

  He blinked, flicked his gaze toward Toria. Watching his reaction, she seemed more frightened by him than by what might be calling her name.

  He whispered, “Mom wouldn’t just call your name. She’d come running. She’d be screaming to get back to us.” He felt Toria’s lips moving against his palm. He continued, “I’m going to take my hand away. Be quiet.”

  She nodded. When she could, she said, “If it’s not Mom, who is it?”

  David listened. No noises at all: no movements, no more calling. “I don’t know.”

  “What do we do?”

  He knew Xander would charge upstairs, opening doors, swinging a bat at shadows; eventually, he’d wind up in another world.

  David wasn’t Xander. He stood, grabbed Toria’s hand. “Come on.”

  Five minutes later, David, Toria, Dad, and Keal stood on the fallen wall. Dad had made what he called an executive decision to let Xander sleep. They started up the flight of steps, listening.

  After a few minutes, Toria said, “But I heard it. I did.”

  David nodded. “I did too.”

  “Could it have been someone sounding like your mom?” Keal said. “You know, to lure you up there.”

  David shrugged. The voice hadn’t been that clear, and it’d spoken only a three-syllable word, twice. To-ri-a . . . To-ri-a. “It was pretty creepy,” he said.

  “So it wasn’t Mom,” Dad said.

  “Only because I knew it couldn’t be,” David said. “She wouldn’t do that. But it sounded like her.”

  Toria looked up at Keal as if into a tall tree. “I did go up there, and nothing happened to me. If someone wanted to get me up there, why didn’t anything happen?”

  “Maybe they heard me,” David suggested. “I might have scared them away.”

  “All we can do is check it out,” Dad said.

  Then he did something that startled David. Instead of creeping up the stairs, some club held high, trying not to make the boards creak, he turned and went up fast, two at a time. Keal went right behind him. David realized that Dad’s approach wasn’t so bad. It was faster, less scary, and didn’t expose them to dangers any more than going up more sneakily would have. He grabbed his sister’s hand and followed.

  The hallway was just as they had left it. All the doors were closed. The aluminum ladder leaned against the far wall. A couple of wall lights were broken or on the floor, the result of various battles. David saw that Xander’s camera was as he suspected: twisted to view not the crooked hallway, but the Mongolian-faced wall lamp.

  Dad opened an antechamber door, peered in, closed it. He went to the next door and repeated the process. Keal started up on the other side of the room.

  “What are you looking for?” David said.

  “We’ll know it when we see it,” Dad said.

  Something about their attitudes heartened David. They acted as though they belonged here. This was their house, and they wouldn’t be scared into acting like wimps. He strode to a door farther along the hallway, grabbed the handle, and froze. All the fear he’d felt in the second-floor hallway came rushing back. That eerie Mom-voice kept echoing around his skull.

  That wasn’t Mom, he thought. No way. And if it wasn’t, then what was it?

  The way things were going, he wouldn’t be surprised to find some wicked dude lurking behind a door. Well, that wasn’t quite right: he’d be surprised out of his socks.

  Strong and . . .

  Oh, get on with it, will you?

  He yanked the door open. Nothing unusual—as far as antechambers went. A white leather jacket with patches of company logos stitched onto the arms, a fire extinguisher, a free-standing speedometer or tachometer or some other ometer. He went to the next one. This time he didn’t hesitate . . . much. The items behind the door made him smile: a rubber clown nose, big floppy shoes, a high-wire balancing pole, a lion trainer’s whip. He wasn’t a big fan of circuses—something about the clowns gave him the creeps—but as long as he was on this side of the portal, it seemed funny that one of the destinations was Carnival World.

  Step right up, folks! See the kid who can change history! Watch him dodge Civil War bullets, Ming Dynasty arrows, and World War II bombs!

  David shut the door and moved on.

  He pushed open the next door. He kept hold of the handle, leaning into the room, ready to pull the door shut again. What he saw on the floor made him lose his grip.

  He fell, and came down nose to nose with Toria’s talking teddy bear, Wuzzy. Its half-bead eyes stared at him. Then it spoke to him in Mom’s voice: “Toria . . . Toria . . .”

  CHAPTER

  twenty - seven

  THURSDAY, 1:59 A.M.

  “With everything going on, I forgot about Wuzzy,” David said.

  He was sitting next to Toria on the antechamber bench.

  Dad stood against the opposite wall, and Keal leaned his shoulder against the doorjamb. They were all staring down at the teddy bear on the floor as though it were a snippy little dog who liked to bite.

  “What is it?” Keal said.

  “My friend,” Toria said, pouty. She looked betrayed by the stuffed animal, and David supposed in a way she had been; scaring
them like that certainly wasn’t very friendly.

  “It has a memory chip in it,” David said. “It records what it hears and plays it back.”

  He remembered the drive up from Pasadena to Pinedale.

  Toria had driven Xander crazy by making Wuzzy mimic his words in a continuous loop: “Nothing but trees,” Xander had complained, looking out the window as they neared town.

  “Nothing but trees.”

  “And it’s playing back your mom’s voice?” Keal said.

  David nodded. “That was her. Definitely.”

  “What’s he doing up here?” Toria said.

  “I think someone wanted to get you alone,” David said.

  “David,” Dad said. His tone said he didn’t want David scaring Toria.

  “Someone did,” David said. He did want to scare her. “And it worked. She came up here, Dad. Maybe she didn’t go far enough down the hallway to get grabbed, or my noises downstairs kept them from doing it, but they could have gotten her!”

  Dad frowned at David, but his expression softened.

  He knows I’m right, David thought.

  Dad turned worried-angry eyes on Toria. He said, “You are never to come up here alone again, you understand? And you’re sleeping in my room from now on.”

  “Maybe we all should,” David said.

  He thought about Xander, still asleep in their bedroom. A chair was wedged under the linen closet door handle, so that entrance into the house was probably secure, and most of the threats against them had come from the doors on the third floor, where they were now.

  Xander’s safe, he thought, but it still gave him the creeps thinking of his brother alone and asleep in this house. How much more defenseless can you be than when you were sleeping? That kicked his imagination into gear. He pictured towering figures standing around Xander’s bed, hunched over him in the darkness.

  He hopped off the bench. “Xander,” he said. “We left him alone.”

  Dad stepped around Wuzzy to put an arm around David’s shoulders. “He’s fine. You’re spooked.”