by Henry Clark
I leaned a little too far to the left and lost my grip on the binoculars. I found myself hanging by a single nocular. I swung out into plain sight.
Garlock consulted a chart on his desk.
“As far as accommodations are concerned…” He stabbed a finger down. “There, perfect! Cell one eighty-six, right next door to our worst offender, Hannibal Brody, a three-time loser! Maybe you can learn a lesson from someone serving a life sentence! Take him away! Turn him over to the guards in block B, and next time you bring me a prisoner, make sure you do it during normal business hours. You’ve made me late for a very important inaugural dinner!”
Nobody was looking in my direction. I grabbed Justice by the nose and got myself back under cover.
“No!” McNamara started to protest, but the gag was yanked back in his mouth. Garlock tossed the case’s paperwork into his top desk drawer, turned on his heel, and left the same way he had come.
The guards dragged McNamara past Justice and out the door. I swung around the statue to stay out of sight, then dropped down to where my friends huddled behind the pedestal.
“My father’s in prison! For life! Because of the way he dresses!”
Frankie sprang up and put her hand over my mouth.
“Shh!” Her eyes rolled toward the door Garlock had left through, reminding me we didn’t know if he was still close enough to hear us.
“Over here,” Tom said in a loud whisper. He had crossed to Harmony’s side of the room and was holding open a door that, when the place was our school library, had led to the media room.
It was now a large office, as we discovered when we slipped into it, and Tom closed and locked the door behind us. I ran to the room’s one window and looked out.
What had been the athletic field behind the school was now a prison exercise yard, fully enclosed by additions to the building that formed a box around it. Loops of razor wire decorated the roofs like hellish Christmas garland, and a guard tower loomed at the opposite corner like a gigantic troll.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded. “Where are we? What’s happened?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Frankie sighed as she put the Shagbolt case down on a desk next to a computer monitor. “Something we did in the past somehow changed the present. We have to figure out what it was, and go back and fix it!”
She sat down at the computer and began tapping away at the keyboard.
“Maybe we should get out of these clothes,” said Tom, plucking at his skirt.
“Don’t bother!” snapped Frankie. “We’re only here long enough to find out what we did to mess things up, then we’re going straight back to 1852 and making it right!”
“I want to see my father!” I circled around to the far side of the desk. “He’s next door to cell one eighty-six! We have to find it!”
“No, we don’t!” Frankie barked. “We’re dressed as nineteenth-century girls in a prison dedicated to locking up people dressed as nineteenth-century girls! Don’t leave this room! They’ll put you in the cell next to his!”
“We have to get him out of here!” I declared. “I mean, I hate it that he dresses as a samurai to go grocery shopping, but he shouldn’t go to prison for it! I have to get to his cell! At the very least, I have to see him!”
“It’s too late,” said Frankie. “He wouldn’t know you.”
“I’ll take off the dress!”
“That’s not what I mean. In this timeline, you probably don’t exist. Neither, in all probability, do I. He literally wouldn’t know you, because he never had you as a son.” She waved her hand at the monitor. “Minorities were eliminated in North America during the Great Purge of 1933. It was a WPA project. ‘We’re Purifying America.’ The Gypsies went first, then everybody else who didn’t meet certain standards. Then, even those who met those standards but who followed alternative lifestyles that made the majority uncomfortable found themselves in the so-called cleansing camps. Certain types of religions. Certain types of families.”
“That’s awful!” I said, running up behind her and looking over her shoulder. The photo on the monitor showed people being led away in chains.
“Those are Asians!” Tom growled, coming up next to me.
“They could just as easily be Romani or Indian or African—” said Frankie.
“Or dressed in togas or tricornered hats,” I said, suddenly seeing little difference between exterminating people for the way they looked to locking them up for how they dressed.
Tom had started nervously flipping his quarter. He took a pencil off one of the desks and began scribbling down the results.
“What could we have done that caused this much damage?” I said in disbelief. “We were there for less than a day!”
“Anything that happened because we were there that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been!”
“You could have warned us this kind of thing could happen!”
“I told you to be careful!”
“Maybe it wasn’t Tom and me. You showed those ladies plastic!”
“They weren’t chemists! They couldn’t have made their own plastic! You, on the other hand, went and invented rock-paper-scissors!”
“Oh, like that could have caused all this?”
“Apophenia!” said Tom, trying out a new curse.
He held up the I-Ching book, open to one of the hexagram descriptions.
“What did you ask it?”
“I wasn’t thinking too clearly,” Tom admitted, chewing anxiously on the pencil’s eraser. “I just wanted to know what our situation was. That’s the hexagram it gave me.”
I looked.
HEXAGRAM 18
DECAY.
SPOILAGE. PUTRESCENCE. ALLROUND YUCKINESS. SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE STATE OF DENMARK, AND YOUR OWN STATE ISN’T SMELLING ALL THAT SWEET, EITHER. SNIFF YOUR ARMPITS: IF THAT ISN’T THE SOURCE, FIND IT!
“Is there a hidden Morse code message?” I asked, pretty sure there would be.
Tom nodded.
“A dash and two dots, followed by a dot, then a dot and a dash, ending with a dash and two dots.”
“What does it spell?
“DEAD!”
CHAPTER 15
T for Torture
I got a shiver, thinking about how appropriate it was for a hexagram called Decay to contain the Morse code for dead. Tom was right; it wasn’t a coincidence.
“Is that it?” I asked Frankie. “Is somebody dead who shouldn’t be? When we were in the past, did we accidentally kill somebody without noticing? What if Chester died of fright when Mr. Ganto took him away? Getting grabbed by Mr. Ganto would have scared me to death. At the very least, I would have needed clean underwear. Or, what if that book they gave you”—I waved at Frankie’s backpack—“was supposed to save somebody’s life, and it didn’t because it wasn’t there when it should have been? Like, maybe someday somebody was supposed to be holding it, and it was supposed to stop a bullet?”
“I’m thinking it might be the opposite,” replied Frankie. “We didn’t accidentally kill anybody, but we did deliberately save somebody’s life. What if Dwina was supposed to die then, but because we saved her, she lived to do something—or her children went on to do something—that eventually caused all this?”
Her fingers typed furiously.
“Are you crazy?” I exploded. “That nice lady? How could she possibly do anything that could mess things up as bad as this? The best thing about our trip was saving her! I’d do it all over again if I had to!”
“You’d probably even save Killbreath under the same circumstances,” Frankie said gently. “I’m beginning to see that’s the kind of person you are.”
“I wouldn’t put that to the test,” I said, not comfortable with a compliment coming from her.
She leaned in and squinted at a blurry PDF file.
“Okay—I did a search for Edwina Landry. The only thing that came up is a genealogical record from 1910.”
“Why Landry?” I asked.
Tom was quick to slip in the answer; it was right up his nineteenth-century alley.
“Because former slaves sometimes kept the last names of their onetime captors, and Dwina mentioned a Master Landry!”
“Yes,” Frankie agreed. “It was a long shot, but here it says Edwina and Seth Landry were married and had a daughter Rosella, who grew up to marry a man named David Stemplehill, and then Rosella and David had three daughters: Violet, Columbine, and—if you can believe it, Morning Glory. The record takes the family up to 1910, but beyond Morning Glory, the original document is too damaged to read.”
“Morning Glory Stemplehill!” I exclaimed, hardly able to believe it.
“You’ve heard of her?”
“My mother used to say that her favorite name of all her ancestors was Morning Glory Stemplehill! She was my mother’s great-great-great-something-grandmother, maybe there should be another great, or a couple less, but I’m a direct descendant!”
“Then, if you add two more greats, you’re directly descended from Dwina herself,” said Frankie thoughtfully. “If you hadn’t saved her, you would’ve ceased to exist!”
My head was starting to hurt, and it wasn’t just from lack of sleep.
“I don’t know about that,” said Tom. “This is a classic Grandfather Paradox. If you traveled back in time and accidentally knocked your grandfather off a cliff before he ever met your grandmother, your father or mother would never have been born, and you wouldn’t exist. But then you couldn’t have gone back in time and accidentally killed one of your ancestors. It’s not possible.”
“It’s like in the old Gypsy rhyme,” Frankie added.
“Your time-travel tales can be thrillers,
’Bout time-traveling grandfather killers,
But with Granddad destroyed,
There is often a void,
And limericks do make good fillers!”
“That’s an old Gypsy rhyme?”
“We also have a nice one about werewolves. So, obviously, Dwina was supposed to live so you could be born and go back in time to save her. It has to be something else we changed that’s made all this mess.”
“Wait,” I said. “If what we did caused that purge thing, where they eliminated a bunch of people in 1933—like, probably, our great-grandparents—why are we still here?”
“We shouldn’t be,” Tom admitted. “Maybe it’s because we’re visiting from a different timeline. Or maybe it’s because we somehow do manage to fix this thing!”
“There’s another computer over there!” Frankie pointed and snapped her fingers. “And there’s a tablet on that table! Help me figure it out! We have to know what we did before we go back!”
Tom went to the other computer and began tapping at the keyboard.
“What, exactly, is it we’re looking for?” I asked, picking up the tablet and watching it spring to life at my touch. It was only 6 percent charged.
“The point where history starts running amok,” said Frankie, rapidly scrolling through documents. “The point where it deviates from the history we know.”
“It would help if we knew more history,” I muttered to myself, looking for a news feed.
“Obviously,” continued Frankie, “it had to have happened after we were there. What was that date again?”
“August 12, 1852,” said Tom as he studied some nineteenth-century photographs. “A very important date in Chinese history.”
“Was it?” Frankie looked up from her scrolling.
“Totally. On August 12, 1852, in San Francisco, the Chinese first introduced chopsticks to America. Two days later, we opened the first Chinese laundry, to clean the shirts of Americans who tried to eat with chopsticks. It was the most brilliant piece of marketing ever, although we try not to brag about it.”
“Did you just learn this?” asked Frankie.
“Gee Gee Pa told me over breakfast the other day.”
“Gee Gee Pa?”
“My great-grandfather. He tries to teach me one new thing about China every morning. Every Friday, he gives a quiz. It makes Puma Ma furious. She says it’s irrelevant.”
“So the date was in your head.” Frankie returned her attention to the screen. “That’s probably why, of all the available dates in the 1850s, we went to that one. Your thoughts overrode mine.” She didn’t sound happy about it. Tom just grinned.
“Hey!” I blurted. “According to this, Lenny Killbreath’s father has been president of the United States for twelve years now! He was just re-elected for a fourth term—the inauguration was today! His son Lenny—eighteen-year-old Lenny!—is Secretary of the Inferior, a department that decides what to do with U.S. residents who fail their annual citizenship tests! Am I going crazy?”
“No, it’s the world that’s gone crazy,” Frankie assured me. “Lenny’s father, Bruno Killbreath, is the fourth member of the Killbreath family to be a president of the United States, starting with Horace Killbreath, who was elected in 1884. Horace’s son, Montgomery Killbreath, was president in 1933 and is considered ‘the architect of the Great Purge.’” She waved her hand at the monitor, as if we might be wondering where she was getting all this from. “After he was elected for a third term, some people started calling him King Monty. Or, at least they did before they were hanged.”
“What could have made the Killbreath family so powerful?” I wondered.
“We did, apparently!” Frankie clenched her fists in frustration. “I haven’t dug far enough yet to figure out what it was—”
“Hey, guys!” Tom’s voice was full of alarm. He pointed with his pencil to the far corner of the room. Just below the ceiling, aimed in our direction, was a TV camera. The little red light on it glowed brightly. “Acrimonious! We’re under surveillance,” he said woodenly. “The I-Ching was right. We’re dead!”
“Maybe not,” said Frankie, renewing her efforts at the keyboard. “There must be a camera in practically every room of this place. Meaning there’s a control booth somewhere with hundreds of TV screens in it. And what? A single guard, maybe two, trying to watch them all? While they also keep an eye on the portable TV they’ve probably got hidden at their desk to watch the football game?”
“Assuming football still exists,” I said.
“They may not have noticed us,” Frankie said, with forced optimism. “One of the guards may be asleep; the other might be in the bathroom; maybe the game’s gone into overtime.”
Something snicked in the lock of the room’s only door.
“Or maybe the guards aren’t football fans,” I said, giving a second look to the room’s window. It was barred, and the space between the bars was too narrow for even a kid to squeeze through, no matter how flattering and slimming the kid’s dress might be.
The door burst open, and two men with machine guns flew into the room. They skidded to a halt, leveled their guns at us, and barked, “Nobody move!”
We didn’t. We locked ourselves into whatever position we were in and stared up at them, wide-eyed. Nothing happened. Long seconds dragged by, and I was almost about to ask “Can we help you?” when Quentin Garlock appeared at the door.
He was wearing a gray winter coat and a gray woolen scarf and gray leather gloves, and even the snowflakes on his shoulders were gray, unless it was dandruff. He leaned wearily against the doorframe and, as he skinned off his gloves, said, “I was almost to my car. A five-hundred-dollar-a-plate dinner, and I’ve already missed a hundred dollars’ worth of fruit cup. What nonsense has called me back?”
He studied us, his expression growing more sour as his eyes roved from Frankie to Tom to me.
“This is a prison!” he announced. “People try to break out of prison. NOBODY breaks into prison! Are you insane? What is wrong with you? Who are you?”
All three of us made the decision not to speak. Garlock turned purple. It was a nice contrast to all the gray.
“Three cross-time dressers! Of three ethnic types that haven’t been seen in these parts since sometime in the last cent
ury! Two of you not even wearing clothing proper to your gender! This has to be some kind of sick joke!”
Our bonnets were hanging down our backs by their chin straps. I was, ridiculously, relieved that Garlock had realized Tom and I were boys.
“And children, on top of it all! Who helped you get in here? It wasn’t Gnuteson, was it? He’s wanted my job for years! He probably thinks this will somehow embarrass me politically. I hate people who scheme to get the jobs of others! ONE OF YOU SHOULD ANSWER ME!”
We all clenched our lips a little tighter.
“Really? Don’t trifle with me! I’m in no mood to waste time!”
Garlock gestured, and one of the guards pulled Frankie away from her computer while the second guard pulled Tom away from his. I slipped the tablet into the pocket of my apron as the guards jammed the three of us shoulder to shoulder in the center of the room.
“Now, I’ll ask you again. What are you doing here?”
We refused to answer. None of us even made eye contact.
“Right! If you want to play it that way, there’s an easy way to make you talk! Millard!” Garlock addressed the bulkier of the two guards. “In the top drawer of that filing cabinet, you’ll find a thin wooden case containing stainless steel implements designed to cut, crack, break, and sever. Be a good lad and fetch it here.”
Millard slung his weapon over one shoulder and rummaged in the drawer.
“We’ll soon have you singing like little birds,” Garlock promised us.
“Uh, where, exactly, would it be?” asked Millard.
“Look under T, for torture,” suggested Garlock.
“Uh, time sheets… tax forms… a recipe for tuna casserole. Nothing to do with torture.”
“Try P for pain.”
“Personnel records… payroll forms… a jar of peanut butter… no wooden case. Maybe under O?”
“O for what?”
“Ouch?”
“Ouch? I’ll give you ouch! Out of my way!”
Garlock shoved Millard aside and ransacked the drawer himself, finally slamming it and pulling open the drawer beneath it.
