by C. W. Trisef
Leaving Tybee, Mr. Coy had to pick up the pace as Stone entered the highway. After heading west, he went south for several miles, then turned eastward, crossed the bridge onto Skidaway Island, and disappeared soon thereafter. Coy’s glasses went blank as Stone fell completely off his radar.
He tapped his glasses several times, hoping it was just a glitch. When it appeared his eyewear wasn’t at fault, he complained, “Tracking dust is supposed to be superior—it’s impossible to fully remove!” He began his descent, intending to land where he had last seen Stone’s tracker on the map before it vanished. Just as his feet were about to make contact with the ground, his wings recoiled, and he immediately looked around to see where he was.
Mr. Coy was standing in the middle of a residential street—the kind that doesn’t see enough traffic to deserve white or yellow lines painted on it. It was not a wide road, becoming ever narrower from the accumulating dirt and creeping weeds along its edges. The desperate roots of mighty oaks had cracked the asphalt in many spots, and their broad limbs cast shadows in the twilight that swallowed the road from view not very far in both directions.
Mr. Coy turned to his side to face the only house he could see for quite some distance, relieved to find Stone’s car parked in the driveway. Visually, it was an impressively attractive establishment. The long driveway, outlined on both sides with box shrubs, led to a broad porch, where hanging baskets and flowerpots overflowed with colorful foliage amid rocking chairs that seemed hardly used. The home’s brick façade, stacked with stones that appeared hewn by hand, gave the house a strong and sturdy appeal. Its large windows afforded its owners sweeping views of the perfectly manicured grounds. All in all, it was a property fit for a public-pleasing and educator-entertaining principal, though Coy found it painfully blah.
It was surrounded by an extensive fence whose sole entrance was the gate directly in front of Mr. Coy. Cautiously, he approached the closed gate, at the foot of which lay the ashen remnants of something that had been incinerated. Upon closer examination, he saw the remains of his tracking dust, a few of the particles twitching with their final breath of electricity.
His face just inches from the gate, Mr. Coy saw an insect fly past him and then through the bars of the gate. There was a tiny flash of electricity, followed by a noise like a cackle, and the bug, now reduced to ashes, flittered to the ground.
Mr. Coy took a wary step backwards, realizing the gate and the rest of the fence stood immediately adjacent to a wall of electricity—a blanket-like laser beam that scorched whatever passed through it.
“I wonder if he owns a convertible,” Coy humored himself. “Now I know why his car is so shiny—must be some special coating that repels electrical impulses.” Then, thinking for a moment, he said, “Either that or some black market Turtle Wax.”
Wanting to learn the extent of this obstacle, he glanced upwards and watched as dozens of zaps were taking place almost constantly due to insects and other debris that were colliding with the invisible, protective dome that covered the expanse of the property.
From the front pocket of his pack, Mr. Coy retrieved two metal devices: one looked like a lead pipe and the other resembled an extra large dinner plate. He inserted the pipe through the hole in the center of the plate and locked it in place. Pulling from both ends, the pipe elongated several feet like a retractable antenna, with the plate uncoiling and wrapping around the bottom half of the pipe as an inclined plane. A cross between a pogo stick and a screw, Mr. Coy stood atop his earth-drilling auger and started manually rotating himself. Each twist brought fresh dirt to the surface and sent him a few inches deeper into the ground.
“Like I always say,” he said to himself, now a few feet under the ground, “I never was one to overachieve.”
Not wanting to run the risk of getting fatally singed by the front yard’s force field, Mr. Coy set out to dig his way under the fence, hoping he would reach safety on the other side since Principal Stone apparently had. Coy’s head had slipped nearly a dozen feet below ground level when his drilling suddenly became quite difficult and took on a much different sound. Wondering if he had struck a rock or perhaps the sewage line, he found he was still able to twist the auger. Without any warning, something gave way, and he came crashing down the hole, through a ceiling, and onto a floor.
A bit shaken up, Mr. Coy slowly rose to his feet and dusted himself off. He was quite perplexed to find himself in a room. The size of a small bedroom, it had a single light bulb that hung by a string from the center of the ceiling. Of most interest, however, was the stuff inside the room.
It was like taking a trip to the past. The walls were covered in articles and clippings from periodicals all across the world, collected from major cities and rural towns, written in a variety of languages. Yet each proclaimed the same headline story of man’s first lunar landing. There was a cassette tape on a nearby shelf labeled “Copy of Nixon’s Phone Call to Moon.” Next to a schematic of some Soviet spacecraft called “Luna 15” was a map of Vietnam and a portrait of a General Wheeler. A letter, written in some type of Chinese dialect, had a note scribbled at the top that said its content pertained to the U.S. easing restrictions against Red China. A scorecard showed how Montreal beat the New York Mets 3-2. A model of an Israeli air fighter hung from the ceiling.
Even for a man as eccentric as Mr. Coy, it seemed odd for Principal Stone to have an entire room dedicated to what appeared to be the happenings on a single day in history. But in addition to the day’s top stories, there was evidence all around that even the tiniest, most globally insignificant events had not gone unnoticed. There were index cards pinned to the wall that told how a specific person did a certain thing at this place and at that time. There were sticky notes listing the progress of a gang or the divorce of a family or the unresolved robbing of a bank. Mr. Coy opened a filing cabinet in which each country in the world had its own hanging file folder where scraps of paper, written in all kinds of different people’s penmanship, were shoved like a receipt collection of a small business.
Despite its chaotic appearance, Mr. Coy had stumbled upon a masterfully organized system of record keeping. Every article and every picture bore evidence that it had been searched and scoured for the minutest clue or detail. Names of NASA employees had been circled and cross referenced, involving a complicated code that corresponded to other resources. Times of the Russian Luna’s launch had been tracked. Attack plans had been pinpointed on the map of Vietnam, and potential flaws were noted next to Wheeler’s peace plan. Attached to a write-up about an Australian mine blast was a thorough list of names and their biographical information. Hanging from the Israeli jet was a breakdown of real planes, Israeli and Egyptian, that had been casualties in the day’s aerial conflict near the Suez Canal. The confidential itinerary of Nixon’s upcoming visit to an all-star baseball game was given particular prominence.
All in all, it was an unsettling display of diligent stalking, a cross between the secret plotting of a mass murderer and a teenage fan’s obsessive admiration of a famed star. And it acted like a bellows to Mr. Coy’s suspicions. He made his way to the door and left the room. On the front of the door was the inscription “July 20, 1969.” He turned around to read the caption on the door across the hall and found that it was occupied by memorabilia from another day in the same year. He glanced up and down the hall, which looked very much like it belonged in a hotel. Each room was reserved for a different day during the year 1969, never skipping or combining days. A kind of track ran down the middle of the floor as far as he could see.
Mr. Coy walked to the end of the hallway, where he encountered a walkway running perpendicular to him with the 1979 corridor beginning on the other side. He turned onto the walkway and proceeded in a direction so that the years were decreasing as he passed by them. Finally, with the 1960 hall on one side and the 1970 on the other, Mr. Coy stepped into a large foyer. It was in the shape of a decagon—a ten-sided circle with hallways beginning at the ends of each
side. Directly across from him, he could see the 1910 and 1920 corridors. Each side of the room represented a decade, thus the entire floor encompassed a whole century. It was like a mind-boggling storage facility for a business conglomerate.
In the center of the circular room was a sort of unenclosed elevator shaft—a portal for a people-mover that not only traveled vertically but also laterally along the tracks that spanned all throughout the labyrinth of floors, halls, and rooms. Mr. Coy had ventured quite close to the portal when he saw the elevator coming quickly towards him. It descended from the floor above, then embarked for the 1980s.
Mr. Coy followed after the elevator. Locating it not far down the 1984 corridor, he peeked around the corner to see who or what was there. It was a woman—a very old woman whose back was so hunched that she stared at the floor when she walked. With a small stack of newspapers in her arms, she halted in front of one of the doors and rubbed her index finger across the inscription of the date. Then she opened the door and carried her load inside. When she reappeared outside, Mr. Coy watched as she seemed to spend a great deal of time feeling things. She had almost stepped into the elevator to fetch a few more things when she suddenly stopped.
“Is that you, Lester?” her feeble voice asked. Mr. Coy looked all around worriedly to see if Stone was present somewhere. When no one answered, she grabbed another load while saying, “I can hear you breathing.”
Feeling relieved, Mr. Coy came out from hiding: she was blind.
“Why yes,” he replied. Then, realizing his blunder, he coughed and attempted to impersonate Principal Stone. “Yes it is, uh…my lady,” unsure of her name. “Please excuse my cold,” he coughed again.
“Oh, Lester,” she said endearingly, “how many times do I have to tell you to call me Charlotte?”
“Never again,” he promised. “Once more was all I needed.” He walked towards her as she continued to unload, making many trips on account of her frailty.
“Can I help you find something?” she inquired.
“Actually,” Coy began thoughtfully, “yes—yes you can.”
“Oh,” Charlotte said, eager to help. “And what is that?”
“I’m looking for a chest—a trunk,” he described, “similar to another I have.”
“You mean the one you asked me to archive a few months ago?”
“Yep,” Coy said anxiously. “That’s the one.”
“If I remember correctly,” she recalled, “I filed that in the nineteenth room of June—the day you gave it to me. Would you like me to take you to it?”
“Well of course I’d—” Mr. Coy said before catching his tongue, remembering to act like Stone even if he really had no idea how to navigate such a maze. “I mean, I’d love for you to take me to it, Charlotte.”
Looking pleasantly surprised, she shut the door of the room, which belonged to March 3, 1984. Being the sightless senior that she was, Charlotte took her time stepping into the elevator. Mr. Coy extended a helping hand and guided her inside.
“Bless your heart, Lester,” she said, sounding stunned. “Feeling chivalrous today, are we?” Coy deemed it best not to acknowledge his action, which was apparently uncharacteristic of Stone.
When they were both inside, the door closed, and Charlotte groped her way to the side panel. Expecting to see a huge array of buttons, Mr. Coy was shocked to see no buttons at all but instead a single clock whose face read thirty minutes past four o’clock. Confused by the time that this clock bore, Mr. Coy glanced at his watch, which differed in the amount of more than two hours later. Choosing not to vocalize his vexation, he watched Charlotte locate the hour hand by touch and then spin it clockwise.
“Let’s see,” she mumbled to herself, apparently thinking through something. “We need to go forward thirty-one years…” Making two full revolutions, she stopped about halfway into her third and situated the hour hand between the eleven and twelve. Each of the sixty tick marks along the circumference of the clock provided just enough resistance for her to feel her way around its face. “…Three months…” She then briefly spun the minute hand clockwise until it rested atop the nine. “…And sixteen days.” Finally, she adjusted the second hand, which had stalled at forty-eight, by advancing it onward by sixteen seconds.
Dumbfounded, Mr. Coy stood in awe as the elevator departed from its previous destination of March 3, 1984, en route to the most recent June 19.
“Impressive,” he remarked.
“Not bad for a blind old coot like me, eh?” she laughed, softly jabbing his side with her elbow. “When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you pick up on a few things.”
“Do you ever get lost?” Coy wondered, amazed by Charlotte’s abilities despite her handicap. “You know, turned around?”
“Occasionally,” she admitted, “but then I just clear the clock back to midnight and start fresh from today.” Mr. Coy didn’t quite understand.
The elevator returned to the twentieth-century foyer, then went up one floor, most of which had yet to be built. Upon arriving at their destination, the elevator door parted, and they found themselves facing the room that contained information pertaining to a day that had transpired just a couple of months ago: June 19.
“I’ll be next door alphabetizing those records like you asked me to,” Charlotte announced, hobbling into the room marked June 18.
“That ought to keep her busy,” Coy muttered, feeling sorry that she was about to embark on a task that was impossible for her, though he was finally beginning to think like Stone.
Coy stepped into the room and found the chest sitting inside. He was quite relieved to have tracked it down at last. Kneeling in front of it, he reached into his shirt collar and pulled out a key that he was wearing on a string around his neck. It was the very key that had been discovered at the foot of the cell when Stone, Quirk, and Bubba had escaped from his yacht a few months ago. From the moment he laid eyes on it, Coy knew it was the key that would unlock Stone’s second trunk. Eager to finally use it, Mr. Coy inserted the key into the large, rusted lock and turned it.
Nothing happened. It remained firmly locked. Mr. Coy was beside himself.
“Then what in the world does this key go to?!” he asked indignantly.
“You shouldn’t need a key,” Charlotte’s sweet voice rang out from the next room. “All the doors are unlocked. You should know that…” Mr. Coy rolled his eyes.
He proceeded to pick the lock using the same putty that he had previously used to break into Principal Stone’s office and snatch the contents of the first chest. But the semi-solid substance refused to harden; in fact, it melted soon after Mr. Coy inserted it into the lock.
“What the devil?” he muttered.
“Keep looking,” Charlotte yelled. “I know it’s in there.”
Mr. Coy touched the chest: it felt warm. Then he touched the lock.
“Sweet mother of Abraham Lincoln!” Mr. Coy cursed upon making contact with the boiling hot lock.
“What’s she doing in there?” Charlotte wondered of the former president’s mother.
On the wall above the trunk was a handsome case containing an old hatchet. A note hanging from the wooden handle said it was purportedly the tool that George Washington used to cut down his cherry tree, sold on this day by one of his descendants at an auction. Mr. Coy ripped off the note and started whaling on the chest.
“Are you okay in there, Lester?” Charlotte asked upon hearing the sounds of wood cracking and splintering.
“Just doing a bit of remodeling,” he hollered back. “That’s all.”
“It looked fine to me,” she said.
Once he had cut out a large wedge from the top of the chest, Mr. Coy wrapped his hand in a nearby Lakers jersey and reached inside. He could feel the heat spewing out of the hole he had created. After a few seconds of groping, he came to the conclusion that there was only one thing within the trunk.
“Stone sure doesn’t utilize space well, does he?” Mr. Coy said to himself, re
membering how there was only a single piece of parchment paper in the first chest. “I bet he pays a fortune at the airport on checked baggage.”
Coy removed the solitary item from the trunk. It was a rock—a large, round rock that was causing his hand to sweat. It was covered in tiny holes—pores where there had once been air bubbles—which made it not very heavy. But it was dark and almost seemed to glow. A little disappointed, Coy wrapped the specimen in the jersey and stuffed it in his pack.
“Smells like fresh hickory in here,” Charlotte observed, appearing in the doorway and sniffing the air. “Did you find what you needed?”
“I certainly did,” Coy said, trying to play it cool.
“Virginia just informed me that supper’s ready,” her hand still resting on a small wireless device clipped at her waist. She turned around, stepped in front of the elevator, and held out her arm, unlinked as if ready for Mr. Coy to assist her again. “Shall we?”
“We shall,” said Coy, ready to make his getaway and glad that he wouldn’t have to find his own way out of such a baffling network of doors, floors, and hallways.
Charlotte located the clock and began working its gears as the ones inside her own brain computed the math. She pushed the minute hand to the twelve, causing the hour hand to do the same, and then pulled back the second hand four notches. She had instructed the machine to take them ahead three months and back four days. Now Mr. Coy understood what she had meant by clearing the clock back to midnight: it represented the present day.
The elevator took them horizontally for a few seconds, then changed course and rose upward very briefly, passing through darkness. When it came to a stop, there appeared to be a tall and narrow doorway in front of them, as if they were standing inside some sort of glass cupboard. Charlotte led the way, stepping out of the elevator and pushing open the door. Mr. Coy mimicked her every move and realized, now on the other side, that they had just passed through a large grandfather clock whose time read twelve o’clock. They were standing in the living room of Principal Stone’s house.
