The Long Past & Other Stories

by Ginn Hale

  Grover hardly heard Nathaniel’s words as he frantically scanned the dust and shattered boulders for Lawrence. To his shock he glimpsed a spark of blue light flicker up to the mouth of the rift.

  He was alive!

  And still intent upon pulling the rift closed. Grover had to get him out of there before the next stone came down right on top of him.

  If Grover hadn’t felt so weak, he would have simply hurled David into Nathaniel and hoped that one of the two toppled over the edge of the bridge. But as it was, he wasn’t certain he possessed the strength to keep his stranglehold on David much longer.

  “Lawry!” Grover called.

  “He’s dead, you dolt. I shot him,” Nathaniel snapped with a self-satisfied smile. “I’m the only one who’s going to give you orders now.”

  “If you know what’s good for you, boy, you’ll release me at once,” David rasped.

  Grover considered responding with another kidney punch, but instead he simply dragged David with him towards Lawrence.

  The shit didn’t resist. He went limp, offering Grover deadweight to pull across the slick stone. Nathaniel followed their movements with his pistol raised and at the ready. Something in Nathaniel’s calculating expression made Grover wonder if the man wasn’t trying to work out what exactly would happen to him if he missed and shot David.

  His earlier reaction to the punch assured Grover that so long as he could keep his hold on David he had Nathaniel as well. They were the same man. David was the embodiment of Nathaniel’s past and what happened to a man in the past carried through to him in the present moment.

  Alter the past and the present would already be changed, because the here and now arose from the past.

  Grover edged by Nathaniel and steadily backed towards the Lawrence. His leg brushed against a rock, and he stole a fast glance back at the chaos of ragged boulders.

  “Don’t even think about chancing a shot.” He snapped his attention to Nathaniel. “Because if you were dead five minutes ago, then you’ll sure as hell be dead now.”

  That seemed to startle both Nathaniel and David. Maybe they’d imagined that no one could ever work out what they truly were—or maybe they were just surprised that Grover had figured it out. Either way Grover didn’t get the opportunity to exploit the instant, as a massive tremor suddenly passed through the bridge and his footing slipped.

  David slithered out of his grip and darted to the cover of a rock far to the right. Nathaniel fired. Between the growing gloom, dust and shaking ground, the shot went wide. But not by far. A splinter of stone smacked Grover’s shoulder. Grover lunged to the left as a second blast tore through the air. He ducked behind a cracked, charred boulder and found Lawrence leaning against it as well.

  Dust powdered Lawrence’s entire body to the deathly pallor of chalk. Except his right arm. The sleeve of his shirt looked burned and stained with dark liquid.

  “You’re bleeding—”

  “Just oil,” Lawrence whispered. “The fool shot me in my missing arm.”

  Another blast sent chips of rock flying several feet from them.

  “He’s to your right!” David shouted.

  “What you said about him dying five minutes in the past making him dead now, you think that’s true?” Lawrence asked.

  “I’m pretty certain.”

  “Good.” Lawrence closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “You run for it as soon as I start.” Lawrence heaved himself to his feet, and all at once an immense geyser of blue fire gushed up around him. Cerulean flames cascaded over the blackened stones overhead and wound around one huge outcropping. Nathaniel Tucker took aim but Lawrence didn’t flinch.

  Grover threw all his concentration against Nathaniel Tucker’s will. The raw drive that he’d felt in the bigtooth was nothing compared to the rage pervading Nathaniel Tucker’s mind. The man roiled with hatred and grievances, but at the core of him a vast fault of thick self-loathing boiled and heaved. He’d destroyed his family home. Drowned his mother and wife. Ruined nations with his incompetence. Shamed his father so deeply the man had taken his own life at the end of Nathaniel’s pistol.

  He gagged on the bitter truth of these things, and at the same time Nathaniel blamed anyone and everyone else for his failings. That withered hag, Honora Astor, had been too old to perform the spell properly. Lawrence Wilder had been too green, Gaston Jacquard too lazy. They had been responsible for the catastrophe, not him.

  And now Lawrence and this black boy spited Nathaniel further, refusing to let him transform the gaping rifts into national treasures. A wailing rage gushed through Nathaniel. He would be vindicated—proved a hero!

  Grover wanted nothing more than to pull himself free from Nathaniel, but he let the swearing, sick anger pour over him. He felt as if he were diving through a sea of vomit. He focused on Nathaniel’s right hand. Dragging up his own memory of broken bones, he drove that agony into Nathaniel’s nerves.

  Nathaniel let out a frustrated scream. The pistol fell from his grip.

  At the same moment Lawrence wrenched a boulder down from the mountain. A sickeningly brief cry escaped David Tucker as the stone slammed down with crushing force. Its impact shook the ground like a hammer striking a drum. Stone debris pelted Grover, and new clouds of dust filled the air like smoke.

  Lawrence’s blue fire gutted. He crumpled to the ground. Grover scrambled over and between the splintered rocks and boulders. His foot slipped, and he tumbled down to his knees twice as massive shudders shook through the mountain and the bridge. Hunks of rock splintered like toothpicks as Grover leapt across a gaping seam in the bridge.

  At any moment he expected to hear a shot ring out from Nathaniel’s pistol or feel a bullet plow into his back. But Nathaniel remained strangely silent. Could he really be dead? Grover hoped so but didn’t dare depend upon the possibility. He moved low and fast as he searched for Lawrence.

  At last Grover found him. He lay on his side, blood caking his hair and dozens of shallow cuts marring his exposed hand and cheek. He coughed and struggled to get to his feet, but couldn’t seem to muster the strength to rise to his knees. When he noticed Grover he shook his head.

  “You have to get out of here, Grove,” he whispered. “It’s all going to come down.”

  “I ain’t leaving you.” Grover crawled across the buckling stone to Lawrence’s side. “Besides, if I go how are you going to reach that last lynchpin?”

  He slipped under Lawrence’s left arm and, taking as much of his weight as he could, steadied him up to his feet. Lawrence sagged into him.

  “I promised you for better of worse,” Grover whispered, though he didn’t know if Lawrence could even hear him over the grating, grinding roar of the mountain. Stone all around them strained and cracked as the mountain’s immense weight bore down on the ragged opening of the rift.

  Grover guided him across the quaking rock and wreckage to the shining opalescent stone of the third lynchpin. He tried not to look at the bloody pool that remained of David Tucker’s lower half. The man’s battered face angled to the side as if staring back at the tangled anchor lines of the distant airship.

  Lawrence sank against the gleaming white stone. The symbol at its center flashed like a firefly dancing in a glass jar. Once this last one was destroyed, the rift ought to collapse. Grover suspected the bridge they stood on would go with it. But he’d already lived without Lawrence, and he didn’t want to do that again.

  “I’m staying,” Grover said. “So let’s get this done with.”

  Lawrence gazed at him for a moment then he reached out and interlaced the dusty fingers of his left hand with Grover’s.

  “For better or worse.” He brought his ivory right hand down on the opal stone. Blue sparks spat up from his ivory arm and a huge bolt burst from his fingertips. The opal cracked black, and the symbol inside snuffed out in a wisp of acrid smoke.


  A deafening crack split the air and hit Grover like a wall of wind.

  Grover threw both arms around Lawrence as the force of the mountain at last crushed the few remaining lynchpins supporting the rift. Walls of stone plunged down. The ground beneath them seemed to lurch violently upward. They were thrown like rags as explosive crashes sounded around them and the air filled with plumes of dust. Grover tensed for the agony of slamming down into the rocks or the merciless water of the Rift River.

  Almost incomprehensibly, he didn’t fall. A cold wind wrapped around him and Lawrence. Immense updrafts seemed to cradle them. Suddenly the roar of crashing rock stilled, and he and Lawrence sank down to the remains of the stone bridge. Walls of dust rolled over them, obscuring everything in a gray haze.

  Again that cold wind rose. The dust parted, and Grover found himself gaping at a clean, uniform-clad vision of Lawrence. His glower broke into a smile as he picked his way across the cracked, pitted bridge to them.

  “Honora,” Lawrence whispered from beside Grover. “Don’t tell me that I actually strut like that.”

  “After this you have cause to, my dear lad,” Honora replied, then she looked to Grover. “Mr. Ahigbe, Hell of a ride you gave us with that pterosaur. Well done.”

  “No trouble, sir—er—ma’am.” In his exhausted state Grover couldn’t help but stare. He felt like he’d somehow slipped back into a fever dream. He wondered how much Honora had witnessed from the stranded airship, and when she must have swung across to the stone bridge.

  “Best stick with sir for the time being,” Honora told him. Then she whipped off her uniform jacket and placed it over Lawrence’s shoulders. How strange it was to see Lawrence gazing at himself with such tender concern. If Grover hadn’t known anything else about her, that expression alone would have made him like her. As it was, he owed her thanks for saving both his and Lawrence’s lives.

  “The dust is clearing fast,” Honora told them. “The crewmen should be here any moment to evacuate the two of you—”

  “Weren’t they firing a cannon at us?” Grover objected.

  “That’s going to turn out to have been a misunderstanding. It was quite dark after all.” Honora favored him with a tight smile. “Rest assured, Nathaniel Tucker will apologize profusely to you both, before he submits his report concerning the absolute necessity of closing the western rift.”

  Considering that the man was dead—double dead, in fact—that struck Grover as highly unlikely.

  Lawrence wiped blood and dust from his face with his sleeve and nodded as if Lady Astor made perfect sense.

  “David’s remains are back in the rubble.” Lawrence gestured behind him. “You should find blood and hair enough to last you a couple months at least.”

  Then Grover remembered that last time Lawrence had mentioned Honora needing hair and blood. She meant to impersonate one of the Tuckers, Grover realized. If she could pull it off, he and Lawrence actually stood a chance of escaping the gallows. He sagged against a hunk of battered rock as relief washed over him.

  “Very good. The two of you sit tight.” Honora motioned with her hand, and the roiling dust opened before her like fancy French doors. She strode away into the gloom. Grover wondered briefly if Nathaniel’s dead body lay somewhere among the rocks, crushed as well, or if he’d somehow simply blinked out of existence. Could a man leave two corpses?

  “It’s done,” Lawrence whispered. He sounded dazed and relieved.

  Grover nodded. They’d truly put the past behind them. Only their futures lay ahead.

  Lawrence leaned into Grover, and Grover carefully wrapped an arm around him. Overhead clouds of dust drifted away to reveal a vast, open sky full of bright constellations.

  Epilogue

  The ridingbird chicks stood about four feet and sported downy coats of fuzzy speckled feathers. The four of them raced across the garden to Toby and Susan as the two children tossed out handfuls of feed. Betty and Romeo looked on from the cover of the apple trees but didn’t rouse from their afternoon nap.

  Watching from the porch of the Wilder House, Grover smiled as little Susan instructed Toby in throwing a lasso and catching the runningbirds’ legs. Her father, Frank, had become an expert during the month he’d looked after Betty and her family while Grover had been summoned, along with Lawrence, across the sea to Washington.

  Neither of the children managed to snag a single one of the chicks, but the hatchling ridingbirds delighted in leaping after and pecking at the ropes as if hunting rattlesnakes.

  Grover glanced across the small table to where Lawrence stretched in his chair, with his hat tipped low to shadow his face. Grover felt half-certain that he’d nodded off. He’d hardly slept last night. Neither of them had—and not for pleasurable reasons either. Lawrence still hadn’t received an official discharge from the Office of Theurgy and Magicum. The threat of being called back onto another battlefield haunted Lawrence. It’d made him anxious even when he settled down to draw in his sketchbook, and it woke him from Grover’s arms at night. Three months had already rolled by, and they didn’t know if Lawrence could consider himself free.

  Very soon Grover needed to head back out to his cabin and prepare for winter. He’d already delayed a week. He supposed he’d wait longer if he had to. He wasn’t about to leave Lawrence. Together the two of them could get everything done that needed doing before the first heavy snow, Grover reasoned to himself, but he didn’t quite believe it.

  He swatted a fat blackfly away from the dish of corn biscuits that Cora Cody had brought over to them.

  Leaning against the porch rails, Frank and Cora took turns calling encouragements to the children and the ridingbird chicks. George Cody’s chair across from Grover’s stood empty. He’d volunteered to fetch the first edition of the New United America News, which would supposedly carry the most recent articles from both sides of the Inland Sea.

  “You know Toby’s already asking about when he can go along with you and Lawrence to your place in the woods.” Cora glanced back at Grover.

  “At this rate he’ll get there before we do,” Lawrence murmured from the shadow of his hat, but his comment didn’t carry past Grover to the other two.

  “Clearly he hasn’t been informed of Susan’s plans for him yet.” Frank laughed. “She’s going to set up a bird ranch bigger than Uncle Grover’s. Toby’s going to be her foreman. And they’re going to trade with Chief Niwot just like her Uncle Grover does.”

  “Really?” Cora smiled as she turned her attention back to the children. Both Cora’s and Frank’s expressions turned thoughtful as they studied the next generation playing so carelessly at the difficulties of a married couple working a ranch together. Grover read concern in both Cora’s and Frank’s expressions but also something like amazement.

  “That would be something, wouldn’t it?” Cora said at last.

  “Yes, indeed,” Frank replied. “Might well happen. The future’s bound to be full of surprises.”

  A surprise would be fine at this point, Grover thought. It was the waiting that just about drove him around the bend. The only bright side to it was that the comforts of the Wilder House had allowed Lawrence to recover his strength. He looked good now, tanned and comfortable, even with his white shirtsleeves rolled up and his new ivory arm exposed for anyone to see. He cast Grover one of those sly, admiring glances. Grover’s pulse kicked up from real low down.

  He longed to have Lawrence to himself—both of them back in the familiarity of the mountains. But they had to wait.

  In the meantime folks wanted to see the medals they’d received for their parts in closing the rift. And they wanted to know about the president and all the fine folks and places that filled the far-off capitol. A few souls, like Reverend Dodd, had even taken the time to tell Grover that after what he’d done for them—facing down dinosaurs and risking his life to close the rift—well, it made them asha
med of how they might have treated him and his folks in the past.

  Most others weren’t much changed. Sheriff Lee still wouldn’t spare Grover the time of day, but then Grover wouldn’t have deigned to ask him either.

  Mayor Wilder had thrown a lavish welcome-home party a week ago. He’d presented Lawrence with his great-uncle’s lucky compass. And a day later when he saw Grover walking along the drive, he beckoned him up onto the front steps to chat and opened the front door for him to come inside.

  Much later, after they’d both probably imbibed far too much whiskey, he even pulled Grover into a strong, fatherly embrace and thanked him for looking after his son.

  “I know…” Mayor Wilder had mumbled. “Always knew you two… You’d be the one to care for him.”

  “I will, sir,” Grover had promised in a warm slur. “Always.”

  They hadn’t said anything more about it since, though the mayor had quietly shared a few stories about Lawrence’s great-uncle and his lifelong prospecting partner—the men who had discovered the seam of alchemic stone that made the Wilder fortune. The two had lived together most their lives, and they shared a grave in the family cemetery. Lawrence and Grover had since paid their respects to the two.

  Grover swatted another fly away from the biscuits. Then he looked out to the drive. George Cody came pelting towards them with a newspaper gripped in his hand.

  Dread filled Grover. Now that Lawrence was a national hero, his next posting for the Office of Theurgy and Magicum might well be printed up in the newspaper.

  If that was the case, Grover decided silently, then he’d leave everything behind—Betty, King Douglass, his home and his friends. He’d register as a mage and follow Lawrence. He hated the thought of losing his home, but not as much as he loathed the idea of letting Lawrence go without a fight again.