Timescape

by Robert Liparulo

  “That doesn’t mean whenever you want,” David said.

  “I know. Don’t be such a baby.”

  “I’m not a—” He stopped. There was no arguing with Xander sometimes. David could fight a thousand wars, rescue children from burning buildings, stay in this house alone, and Xander would still find a reason to call him a baby.

  Keal stepped into the doorway. “Xander, only take enough items to open the door,” he said. “Both of you go together. When you get there, give an item to David, so he can get back if you get separated. That way, I’ll be able to come get you, if you’re not back in—” He looked at his watch. “Say, a half hour. Deal?”

  “What if it takes longer?” Xander said. “What if—”

  “Half an hour,” Keal repeated. “That’s it. Don’t make me come drag you home. What?” He was looking at David’s grin.

  “Mom would like you,” David said.

  He patted David on the arm. “I’m sure I’d like her too.” He pointed. “Take the hammer, tool belt, and blueprint. Those are the things Jesse specified. Better stick to the plan.”

  Xander strapped on the tool belt and picked up the hammer and scrap of paper. He opened the portal door. Bright sunlight streamed in. A fresh smell, like trees and grass, blew in on a gentle breeze.

  “What do you see?” David said.

  “Trees.” Xander smiled over his shoulder. “Nothing but trees. Ready?”

  David returned the smile. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER

  thirty - eight

  Xander had been right: nothing but trees in every direction. David couldn’t name them to save his life, but he appreciated their beauty. Sunbeams speared down from the sky, breaking through the foliage in a hundred places. So while much of the woods was in shadow, it wasn’t spooky. A warm breeze touched his arms and face. It was the kind of place the King family used to go for picnics. They’d always favored the woods over parks and open areas. Maybe that’s one reason they’d liked the house when they’d first found it.

  Should’ve kept looking, he thought. But even if they’d hated it, Dad would have insisted. That’d been his plan.

  David sat on the ground where he had wound up after spilling out from the portal. He had tucked his cast close to his body and avoided getting it banged again. Maybe he was starting to figure out this portal-jumping business.

  Xander hadn’t been as lucky. He had cracked his head on a tree, and now he was sitting up against it, rubbing his skull.

  David stood. “You okay?”

  “My head’s getting more knots than these trees,” Xander said. “Here.” He held the scrap of blueprint.

  David took it and flapped it around. “This little thing has a pull I’d be able to feel?”

  “Drop it and follow it, like we did the yarn. Just don’t lose sight of it.”

  David pushed it into his back pocket. He looked around. “Any idea where we should go?”

  Xander pushed himself up. “Just start walking, I guess.”

  They’d gone forty or fifty paces when a sound reached them. It was the distinctive pound-pound-pound of a hammer. Someone pounded, paused, pounded. David could almost see him hammering in a nail, lining up another one, and pounding on it.

  Xander raised his eyebrows, and the brothers headed for the sound.

  The pounding continued, grew louder, then stopped.

  They trudged on, going around bushes, ducking under branches.

  Xander braked. His arm shot up to stop David. “No way!”

  David followed his gaze, and his heart skipped a beat. Carved into a tree was the face of their family mascot, Bob. David ran to it. He put his fingertip into the groove that made Bob’s bulbous chin. “Looks fresh,” he said.

  Xander stepped beside him. He brushed his fingers over the whole face.

  “You think it’s Mom?” David said. Hoping against hope.

  “Who else?” Xander said, smiling.

  David had seen it on the Titanic too. “She could be leaving messages for us,” he said, “like we are for her. Telling us where she’s been.”

  “Maybe it’s like a marker,” Xander said. “You know, not just where she’s been, but a place to go. If she finds herself in a world she’s already been to, she comes to where she left Bob and waits. If we do the same, we’ll have a better chance of finding each other.”

  “Maybe she’s here,” David said. “Now.”

  “Could Jesse have known that?” Xander puzzled.

  The pounding started again.

  “Come on,” David said, heading toward the sound. As he walked, he scanned everywhere, looking for more signs, a person, Mom.

  They went up a small incline, then down the other side till they came to a wall of bushes that stretched a good distance on either side. Xander pushed through, and David followed. When he emerged, he bumped into Xander’s outstretched arm.

  Xander was staring at someone sitting on a log fifty feet away. The person’s back was to them. He—David thought it was a he—was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans. Nothing weird, like the other worlds they’d visited. He had blond hair, and his head was bent forward. The way his shoulders and arms moved, he was fiddling with something, David thought. Not just sitting there or reading a book.

  Xander started for him, tiptoeing.

  David caught up and tapped him. He whispered, “Shouldn’t we call to him? We don’t want to scare him.”

  “I want to make sure that’s not a gun he’s got, first,” Xander said. He took a step. A twig snapped under his foot.

  The person snapped his head around. He set something on the ground, hopped up, and turned. He was a boy, about David’s age. He stared at them, his mouth hanging open. David saw that he was gripping a knife.

  David waved. “Hi! We didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Does he even speak English?” Xander whispered.

  “What are you doing here?” the boy said.

  David backhanded Xander’s leg. “We’re looking for someone.”

  “Who?” The boy looked in the direction of the hammering.

  “Our mother,” David said.

  “You lost her? Around here?”

  David walked toward him. “It’s sort of hard to explain.”

  The boy took a step back. His foot came down on something, and he almost fell. “Stay there!” he said. He lifted the knife, but he didn’t look like someone who’d use it on them.

  David stopped. “We’re not here to hurt you. We want to just look around.”

  “Well, you can’t. Not here. This is private property. You’re trespassing.”

  “Come on, man!” Xander said. He strode past David.

  “Dad!” the boy yelled toward the pounding. “Dad!” The hammering continued.

  David fell in beside Xander. When they were twenty feet from the kid, they stopped. Xander lifted his arm over David’s head, pointing. “There’s a face on a tree over there, a cartoon face. Do you know anything about it?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Like my brother said, we’re just looking for someone. You don’t have to cop an attitude, all right?”

  The boy looked puzzled.

  “The face?” David said.

  “I carved it,” the boy said.

  “You did?” Xander said. “Where did you—”

  “What year is it?” the boy demanded.

  Xander squinted at him. “What?”

  “What year is it!” He screamed it.

  The pounding stopped, then resumed.

  David and Xander looked at each other. David shrugged.

  “Uh . . .” Xander said.

  “I knew it!” the boy said, stepping back. “I knew it! Dad!

  Dad! You have to go back! You don’t belong here!”

  “Wait a minute,” Xander said, walking forward. “You know about the . . . the . . .”

  The boy backpedaled and went down on his butt.

  Xander stepped over the log.

>   The boy pointed the knife at him. “Stay back!”

  “Xander,” David said, stepping over the log. “You’re scaring him.”

  “He knows, Dae. He knows about the portals.”

  “Portals?” the boy said. “What are portals?”

  David shifted his feet. His heel tapped something that rustled. A brown paper sack, its top rolled tight. His eyes shifted to the thing the kid had been fiddling with before they startled him. He stopped breathing.

  It was a box, shaped like a half cylinder. Carved into its curving surface was a warrior thrusting a spear. The warrior’s target was smooth wood, but David knew what would go there: another fighter. He’d seen it before, finished. And it wasn’t a box. It was one of the wall lights in the curvy third-floor hallway of their house.

  “You . . .” David said. He looked at the boy, who was looking up at him with big blue eyes. “Who are you? I’m David. This is my brother, Xander. What’s your name?”

  Before the boy answered, David knew. Those blue-blue eyes.

  The boy’s brows came together. He said, “I’m Jesse. Jesse King.”

  CHAPTER

  thirty - nine

  David sat down hard on the log.

  “What?” Xander said.

  David grinned. He waved his hand at the boy. “Xander, he’s Jesse! Jesse! ”

  Xander’s face swung around to the boy, then back to David. “That’s not Jesse’s last name. It’s . . . it’s . . .”

  “Wagner,” David said. “He changed it! He told me! He said a lot of people in our family go by different last names. Because of . . . I don’t know, the house or what they do or something, they change their names.”

  Xander appeared completely baffled. He leaned closer to the boy, squinted at him. “Jesse?”

  “That’s my name,” the boy said. “But . . . but I don’t know you. What is he talking about?”

  “Look at his eyes, Xander,” David said. “Don’t you recognize them? This is how he knew you and me, but not Toria. Remember? When we first met him, he knew our names. You asked how he knew us, and he said something like, ‘Well, I’ve met you.’ It was weird, because I thought, how do you meet someone but they don’t meet you? He had met us—when he was a kid. He remembered. But at the time, we hadn’t met him.”

  Xander nodded, but his face still held on to a puzzled expression. “This is too weird.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Jesse said.

  David said, “You know about the portals, right?”

  Jesse simply stared at him.

  “Maybe you don’t call them that,” David said. “The time traveling? Going to different times and places?”

  Jesse looked at each of them in turn. He scrambled up. “I have to go get my father.”

  “Wait,” David said. “We’re Kings too. If you know about the time traveling, then maybe you’ll believe this. We come from the future.”

  Xander laughed. “Oh, man, that’s a line.”

  David smiled, but continued. “You’re our great-great-uncle.” He could’ve said “We’re from Mars” and not have gotten a more confused-worried-startled look from Jesse. “I know it sounds crazy. Look, how old are you—like, twelve?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen? Well, you look younger than your years when you’re ninety too.”

  Xander was looking at David, a half smile showing his amusement.

  “So.” David put his fingers to his temple and calculated. “Then it’s . . . 1929! Right?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  David waved his hand in front of himself. “I don’t know Jesse’s exact age. Ninety something. But I was close.”

  Jesse looked toward the pounding, then back to David.

  “Okay, see this?” David bent and picked up the wall light.

  Xander saw it, and said, “Whoa! That’s—”

  “Shhh,” David said. “Don’t say anything.”

  Jesse stepped forward. “Hey, put that down.”

  “Dude!” Xander told him, holding his palms out. “Get rid of the knife, all right?”

  Jesse looked at it as though he’d forgotten about it. He said, “What about that ?” He nodded toward the hammer in Xander’s hand.

  Xander hooked the claw onto his back pocket.

  Jesse folded the knife blade into the handle and pushed it into his front pocket.

  “Okay,” David said. He held up the wall light as though he were displaying it to his class for show-and-tell. “See this blank area where you haven’t carved anything yet?”

  Jesse nodded.

  “It’s going to be another warrior. He’s getting stabbed by this guy’s spear.” He smiled at Jesse.

  Jesse’s mouth dropped open. His eyes went wide, and he stared at David. “How did you . . . ? Let me see that.” He grabbed the wall light and squinted at the blank area.

  “And,” David said, “I don’t know if you even know this yet, but you—or somebody—is going to carve all the way through.

  You’re going to make slits in the eyes, along the spear, in a kind of sunshiny pattern above the stabbed guy.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse said. “I was planning to do that.”

  “Because it’s a wall light, right?”

  Jesse handed the carving back to David. His legs folded, and he sat on the ground. He looked at David, really looked at him. He did the same with Xander. He said, “So you guys came through the holes?”

  “You sent us,” David said.

  “Me?”

  “When you’re an old man. You come to help us, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing.” David caught Xander’s eye.

  His brother shook his head, clearly sharing David’s thought: He doesn’t need to know he gets stabbed.

  “So you know me as an old man?”

  “Yeah,” David said. “You got a long life ahead of you.”

  Jesse smiled. “Am I hip?”

  “Hip?” David said. “Oh, you mean cool. Yeah, you’re totally hip.”

  “You’re a good guy,” Xander agreed.

  David shifted his foot, and it came down on the brown paper sack. He felt something squish inside.

  Jesse leaned over and snatched it up. He opened it, then pulled out a sandwich, half flattened.

  “Sorry,” David said.

  Jesse smiled and held it out to him. “Hungry?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Xander shook his head.

  Jesse produced a piece of hard candy in a wrapper. He tossed it to David, and a second one to Xander. David set his down and shook his head at Xander.

  “So,” David said. He picked up the wall light. “Why are you making this?”

  “Don’t you know?” Jesse said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  David frowned. “We haven’t known the old Jesse that long. Just a few days.”

  “But you said I’m your great—”

  “Great-great uncle,” David said. “But we didn’t know you even existed until a few days ago.”

  “That’s too bad,” Jesse said. “Maybe I’ll come find you sooner now . . . after you’re born.” He smiled, and David’s heart ached: he recognized it.

  “I don’t think so,” Xander said. “We already know that part of our past.”

  “But that’s okay,” David said. “You come when we need you.”

  CHAPTER

  forty

  Jesse pointed at the wall light. “Sometimes people come through the holes. Dad thinks they stumble into them the first time, you know, by accident.”

  “The first time?” Xander said.

  “Sometimes they come back,” Jesse said. “They figure out where the holes are in their time. Maybe they mark them or something. Maybe they don’t move around the way they do when Dad goes into one and has to come back.”

  “Your father goes over?” Xander said.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s what we do.”

  “We? You go?”

  Jesse’s face g
rew long. “Not yet. Dad says I’m too young.

  But someday. How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” Xander said.

  “Twelve,” David said.

  “Wow,” Jesse said. “Your dad must be hip.”

  “He is,” David said. “What about the wall light?” He was starting to believe it was for this that Jesse wanted them to find him. Then it dawned on him: this was what he meant when he said “Come see me.”

  “Well,” Jesse said, “we don’t know how, but the people find their way back here.”

  “Why?” Xander said. “What do they do?”

  “Explore, I guess,” Jesse said. “They usually come back armed. Spears, knives, clubs. Dad says they’re just mean-spirited and looking for trouble.”

  “Then what?” Xander said.

  “Usually we catch them, hold them till we find the hole they came from. Sometimes we have to wait until we feel the hole looking for them.”

  “The pull,” David said.

  “Yeah, like that,” Jesse said. “Then we throw them back in.”

  “You throw them back into the portal . . . the hole? You and your dad?”

  “Mostly Dad and my older brother, Aaron.”

  “Hold on,” Xander said. “Doesn’t the door stay open till they go back?” He looked at David. “It does when Phemus comes through.”

  “Door?”

  “The door over the port . . . the hole. You know, through the antechamber.”

  “Ante-what?”

  “The little room where the portal door is.”

  Jesse’s face lit up. “You go through a door? And there’s a little room for each door?”

  “Yeah,” Xander said. “Don’t you?”

  “Not yet,” Jesse said, excited. “Dad’s building them now! He put one together just to see if his idea worked. It did, so we’re building a bunch of them. And a house that we’re going to live in!”

  “You’re building the house?” Xander said. “Now?”

  Jesse touched his ear and held his finger up, indicating the pounding. “That’s what he’s doing.”

  Xander looked that direction. “Oh, this I gotta see.”