Point of No Return

by Paul McCusker

“You’re coming with me, boy,” Mason shouted as he prepared his whip for another strike. Clarence leaned down to his daughter and said only “Behave” before he stumbled after Mason.

  “Lord Jesus, help me!” Eveline cried. Matt, still winded, crawled over to her and put his arms around her.

  The slave trader stepped forward, his teeth grinding with anger. “You young ones need a lesson, I think.” He started to kick at them with his pointy-toed boot. Matt threw himself between the trader and Eveline to take most of the blows.

  “Stop it! Stop it right now!” someone shouted.

  The kicking suddenly stopped as the slave trader backed away. “Yes, Colonel,” he said obediently.

  Colonel Alexander Ross knelt down next to Matt and Eveline. “Can you sit up?” he asked gently.

  Matt nodded and, with aching ribs, sat up. Eveline wiped away her tears and did the same.

  “What a brave boy you must be,” Colonel Ross said to Matt. Then he gestured to the slave trader and said, “I want them.”

  Matt looked away to keep him from seeing the tears gathering in his eyes.

  “For what service, Colonel?” the slave trader asked.

  “House servants,” he answered. “What’s their price?”

  “Normally, I would ask—”

  “I’ll give you $500 for the two of them.”

  Once again the slave trader looked at Boss. Boss slowly nodded. “Five hundred it is, Colonel.”

  The colonel helped them both to their feet. “Come on, children. You’re coming home with me,” he said with a smile.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JACK AND ANDREW ARRIVED in Huntsville close to noon. At the Liberty Hotel, a telegram was waiting for Andrew. He opened the envelope, read the message, and then leaned against the counter with a grimace.

  “What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

  “My friend investigated Mr. Ramsay’s stock of slaves and learned through the overseer that Clarence, Eveline, and Matthew were taken to the slave market.” He folded the telegram and shoved it into his coat pocket. “That’s a setback. I wouldn’t have expected Ramsay to dispose of them so quickly.”

  “What do we do? We have to find them!” Jack said, his worst fear becoming a reality.

  Andrew nodded and turned to inquire casually if the clerk knew of any slave markets taking place that day.

  “I’m not entirely certain,” the clerk replied. He then held up his hand and turned to a black porter nearby. “How about it, Sam? Do you know of any markets going on today?”

  Sam took off his glove. “Well, sir, Monday is usually a good day for buying. But I heard of only one market and that was this morning.”

  “Are you sure?” Andrew asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Sam answered. “My cousin Ishom was to be sold there.”

  “Take us,” Andrew said.

  Sam looked to the clerk for permission. The clerk shrugged and said, “At the usual rate.”

  On the street, Sam flagged them a carriage, climbing up next to the driver while Jack and Andrew got into the back. They made their way through the city streets at a speed that Jack thought might drive him crazy. He kept looking out the window just in case he could spot Matt in the business-day crowds. At one junction he did see something that caught his eye.

  “Look!” he shouted to Andrew.

  Andrew leaned over. “What?”

  “That wagon. Aren’t those the slave hunters from Odyssey?”

  As Andrew got into a better position to look, the wagon turned out of sight. “Missed it,” he said.

  Jack wiped the sweat from his brow. “It was them. I swear it was.”

  “Then perhaps we’re closer than we could’ve hoped.”

  The carriage weaved through the traffic to a less-crowded area of town. The driver pulled up to a cluster of brown buildings that Jack would’ve called shacks.

  “This is the place,” Sam said, leaning down from the driver’s seat. “That courtyard yonder.”

  Jack and Andrew climbed down from the carriage. Jack nearly ran to the wide gate, but Andrew put a firm hand on his shoulder. “Not so fast. You can’t look too interested,” he whispered.

  They walked to the gate, opened it on creaky hinges, and stepped into the empty yard. On the opposite end, a bearded man spied them and waved. “Hello!” he called and crossed over to them.

  “Greetings,” Andrew said. “Is this the slave market?”

  “One of them,” the man said. “The only one today.”

  Andrew smiled. “I see. What time may we have the pleasure of seeing your…your slaves?”

  “Nine o’clock this morning,” the man replied.

  “We missed it?” Jack asked anxiously.

  The man looked at Jack as if surprised that he would speak. “Yes, you did.”

  “Did you have a man with a boy and girl about my age?” Jack asked quickly.

  The question raised the man’s eyebrows. “We have a lot of men, boys, and girls. Women, too. What’s your interest?” The man’s tone was suspicious.

  Andrew cleared his throat. “We had heard of three particularly valuable slaves from Mr. Ramsay’s plantation. We’re sorry we missed the opportunity to buy them, that’s all.”

  The man eyed them carefully. “Well, they were here—and they’ve been sold.”

  “Sold!” Jack shouted.

  “Oh, dear. And we’ve come all this way,” Andrew said with mock unhappiness. “May we ask to whom they were sold?”

  “I don’t remember,” the man said, but he gestured so subtly that Jack almost missed it. He rubbed his fingers together.

  Andrew sniffed casually, reached into his waistcoat pocket, and retrieved a couple of coins. He handed them to the bearded man.

  Back at the hotel, Jack and Andrew entered their room. No sooner was the door closed than Andrew grabbed Jack by the arm.

  “Hey!” Jack reacted, alarmed.

  “Listen to me, young man,” Andrew said sharply. “Our lives—and the lives of many others—are dependent on being as unassuming as possible. We cannot draw attention to ourselves. No one must ever suspect that we’re up to anything unusual or everything we hope to accomplish will be completely destroyed. For that reason, you must keep your mouth shut and do only what I tell you to do. Do you understand?”

  Jack nodded his head. “Yes, Uncle Andrew.”

  “Good,” Andrew said and let him go. “We’ll have to pray that the slave trader doesn’t run back to his customers and tell them about our questions.”

  “But you paid him!”

  Andrew unbuttoned his shirt and toyed with a necklace just beneath. “I paid him for some answers. I’m not so optimistic that it will also keep him from talking.”

  Jack dropped himself into a particularly uncomfortable chair. “This is a disaster. They’ve been sold. And not just sold—they’ve been sold to two separate people! How are we supposed to rescue them now?”

  Andrew tugged at the necklace, and Jack now saw that it held a small silver cross. “By faith, Jack. We’ll rescue them by faith.”

  Andrew turned away from Jack and poured water from a pitcher into a bowl. He began to wash his face and neck. Jack dropped his chin onto his fist and, as he did, suddenly felt a strange tickling sensation go through his stomach. Butterflies, he thought. I’m feeling nervous about Matt.

  But the butterflies flew on and Jack felt that weird surge through his body as if he were on a roller-coaster ride. He tried to stand up but couldn’t. Alarmed, he called out to Reverend Andrew, who suddenly spun away from him—along with the room and the light—into darkness.

  “What’s going on here?” a deep, warm voice echoed in the darkness.

  At that same moment, Matt was on the back of a wagon trying to comfort Eveline. She hadn’t stopped crying since they had left the slave auction and drove away toward the colonel’s plantation.

  “They took my daddy, they took my daddy,” she wept again and again.

  His sides still hurting, Ma
tt winced as he leaned close to her. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”

  “How?” Eveline sniffed.

  “I don’t know,” Matt said. “But we will. I promise.”

  She put her head against his arm. “Promise?”

  “Yeah,” Matt replied and leaned his head against the coarse siding on the wagon. He closed his eyes wearily. His stomach lurched as if the wagon had suddenly slipped into a dip in the road. And that’s when he heard the voice.

  “What’s going on here?” it asked.

  It was so present that Matt thought someone had whispered in his ear. He opened his eyes while his stomach continued to do flips. Of course, he expected to see Eveline and the back of the wagon they’d been riding on. Instead, he found himself looking at a flashing red light.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “WELL?” THE VOICE asked again.

  “Who’s there? Where are you?” Jack asked, still not able to see anyone. He was aware that his right arm felt prickly, as if it had fallen asleep. He pushed out with it and hit someone.

  “Ouch. Cut it out.”

  Jack turned a little, and in the glow of a flashing red light he saw the outline of a face. “Matt?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Matt answered. “I’m waiting for my stomach to settle down.”

  “Me, too. And I’m really confused,” Jack said.

  “So am I. How did we get here?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure where here is. Did you hear that voice?” Jack asked.

  “Uh huh. Are we home?”

  The voice bounced around them again. “Jack? Matt? Are you in there?”

  “It’s Mr. Whittaker,” Jack said, elated. “We’re here!”

  With a whoosh, the door to the Imagination Station slid open. Light assaulted Jack and Matt so that they winced and had to lean back and cover their eyes.

  Whit stood with his hands on his hips and a disapproving look on his normally friendly face. “Come out of there. I want to know what the two of you are doing in my machine without permission. Don’t you realize how dangerous it is—messing around with something you don’t understand? What if it locked you in and I didn’t come back down as soon as I did?”

  Jack sheepishly crawled out, explaining as he did, “We didn’t know what it was. See, we were playing behind Whit’s End and found the tunnel, and it led to here and we saw the machine and…” Jack’s voice trailed off as he realized Whit was looking beyond him.

  “Matt?” Whit called out.

  Jack turned around to see that Matt was still inside the Imagination Station. “Come on, Matt,” Jack insisted.

  “No,” Matt said in a small voice. “I can’t.”

  Whit cocked one of his bushy white eyebrows. “You can’t?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I promised,” Matt said with a sniffle from the shadow of the machine.

  Jack was surprised to realize that Matt had a choked crying sound in his voice.

  “What did you promise?” Whit asked.

  “I promised Eveline that I would help her find her father.”

  “Eveline?”

  “The slave girl,” Jack explained. “She and Clarence were captured by the slave hunters and taken to Alabama. They took Matt, too. Reverend Andrew and I followed them.”

  Matt continued from inside the machine, “They sold Clarence to another plantation, then they sold me and Eveline to some colonel. She was crying, Mr. Whittaker, and I promised. Please don’t make me leave them there.”

  Whit stroked his mustache for a moment, then strolled over to his workbench. “That’s not how the story went,” he said as he picked up one of the books lying there.

  “Story?” Jack asked.

  “I’ve been programming the Imagination Station to play out different kinds of stories—from the Bible and from history.” He flipped a few pages in the book, then turned to Jack. “I had set the Imagination Station in its program mode to input all kinds of information, including Clarence’s and Eveline’s story. They had been caught by the slave hunters here at Whit’s End and taken south—”

  “Just like we said!”

  “Yes, but they weren’t sold to separate slave owners in the original story. They were both sold to Colonel Alexander Ross. Later, Reverend Andrew showed up posing as an ornithologist—”

  “Yeah! I was with Reverend Andrew!” Jack said excitedly. “I was his assistant!”

  Whit shook his head. “It’s very strange. You must have come in right after I went upstairs. I’ve only been gone for 15 minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes!” Jack cried out. “We’ve been in there for almost two weeks!”

  Whit scrubbed his chin. “The adventures work at an accelerated pace.”

  Jack couldn’t believe it. “Wow,” was all he could figure to say.

  Whit continued, “But what doesn’t make sense to me is why the story has changed.” He fell silent for a moment, then suddenly snapped his fingers. “You two must have gotten into the Imagination Station while it was in the middle of inputting the program! Your interference changed the story.”

  Jack felt like Whit was blaming them for something, but he didn’t understand enough of what he just said to know for sure.

  “You mean we messed it up?” Matt asked.

  Whit leaned against the door to the Imagination Station and peered in at Matt. “It looks that way.”

  That’s what happens when you do things you’re not supposed to do.

  Though Whit didn’t say those actual words, Jack and Matt both felt the sting as if he had.

  Matt got that choked sound in his voice again. “But what’s it mean? Are Clarence and Eveline in trouble because of us?”

  Whit shrugged. “By getting into the machine when you did, you changed the program—and must have changed the story.”

  “Then we have to go back and fix it,” Matt said urgently.

  “It’s only a story, Matt,” Whit said.

  “No, it isn’t! It was real! They were real. You have to let me go back. I promised I’d help!” Matt’s voice was high-pitched and panicked.

  Whit gazed at Matt warmly, his eyes soft with understanding. “You’re taking this pretty seriously.”

  “I promised,” Matt said quietly.

  Whit turned to Jack. “You, too?”

  Jack nibbled on his lower lip, then nodded. “Yeah. Reverend Andrew was counting on me to help,” he said with more confidence than he felt.

  “Reverend Andrew’s mission—and what happened to Clarence and Eveline—took a lot of courage. It won’t be easy,” Whit told them.

  “It wasn’t easy before,” Matt said.

  Whit glanced at his watch as if to confirm that they still had time enough to do it. He then waved his hand for Jack to get back into the machine. “Go on. But I’ll be watching you closely this time. And when you’re finished, we’re going to have a talk about you sneaking in here in the first place.”

  Jack settled into the seat next to Matt again. Matt turned his face away, embarrassed that he had become so emotional.

  “Just push the red button when you’re ready,” Whit said as the door closed.

  “We have to be out of our minds to go back,” Jack said in the darkness.

  “Yeah. We probably are,” Matt agreed.

  Then Matt reached forward and pushed down on the flashing red button.

  (To be continued)

  INTRODUCTION

  AS PART OF THE BOYS’ “punishment” for getting into my workroom (and the Imagination Station) without permission, I made them write down the rest of their adventure. I polished it up a little, fixed the spelling, and edited it so readers can follow who is telling what part of the story where and…well, you’ll see.

  They wanted to call it Jack’s and Matt’s Big Adventure, but they got in a loud argument over whose name should go first. So I suggested we call it Freedom Run as a follow-up to Dark Passage. I’ll stop taking up your time now and let
the boys tell their own stories.

  —John Avery Whittaker

  CHAPTER ONE

  Matt tells about the plantation.

  I SCOOTED OVER IN the seat as Jack squeezed next to me in the Imagination Station. He didn’t say anything. I was glad. Nothing a guy hates worse than to have his best friend make a fuss about the fact that he was crying. I turned away and rubbed my eyes. I hoped my nose wouldn’t run. It always runs when I cry, and I didn’t have a tissue.

  It was kind of dumb to get so upset, I know. But I felt bad about promising to help Eveline find her father and then—zing—all of a sudden being yanked out of the slave wagon and brought back to my time. Don’t get me wrong; I was happy to be home. I didn’t think we’d ever get back. I hated being a black kid in a world where everyone thought blacks were good only for being slaves. I hated being treated worse than an animal. I wanted to get back to my Odyssey, where people treated me like…well, me.

  But poor Eveline was stuck back there on that wagon without her father, and it was my fault in a way. If Jack and I hadn’t gotten into the Imagination Station in the first place, things would’ve turned out the way they were supposed to. I mean, what could I do except go back and try to fix everything? What would you do?

  “Just push the red button when you’re ready,” Mr. Whittaker said as the door to the Imagination Station whooshed shut. The lights on the panel blinked at us like a Christmas tree.

  “We have to be out of our minds to go back,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, we probably are,” I answered.

  Jack reached over and pushed down on the flashing red button.

  The machine hummed louder and louder until it felt like it had suddenly jumped forward. I had the same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get on a roller-coaster ride. Or in the car when my dad hits a dip in the road too fast. It turned my stomach upside down and sucked the breath out of me. Everything went dark. For a minute, I wasn’t sure where I was. Then I smelled old straw and heard the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the slow creaking of a wooden wagon. I guessed that somehow the Imagination Station had put me right back where I was before. Only now I was half-buried in a pile of straw. I sat up and my body ached all over. I forgot about being knocked around by Mr. Ramsay’s overseer and kicked by the man at the slave auction.