by Alton Gansky
She sighed from deep in her soul, then started down the corridor. I had a bazillion questions but didn’t ask them. Helsa had something to show us and she was intent on doing so right now. We fell in line and followed her as she led us to another wing of the building. I noticed the doors had numbers and many had lights over the door. It reminded me of a hospital. Then it hit me. It was a hospital. At least a hospital wing.
Helsa stopped at a pair of doors. A sign was mounted to each of the doors, signs I couldn’t read, but—if I were a betting man—I would wager they read NO ADMITTANCE. A phone hung next to the doors. Amazing how many things were the same in our two worlds, universes, or whatever. The phone looked like the wall-mounted variety back home, but was the color of Red Vines candy and slightly smaller than I would have expected. She said something into the phone that was just as mysterious to me as the words on the sign.
The doors swung open and Helsa walked through. “Brace yourself.”
I hate it when someone says that.
I led the others in. They seemed a little hesitant after Helsa’s warning.
The place smelled of old people. The air was a mix of antiseptic, urine, skin lotion. The room reminded me of an ICU unit, except the patients didn’t have private rooms. I guess it was more of a ward than anything else. Nurses, dressed in blue uniforms, moved from bed to bed. There were, by my estimation, forty or so souls there. I could only guess at the ages of people. Some looked to be in their early sixties, others looked well beyond the century mark.
For a moment I was certain I had just walked into a sci fi movie. IV bags hung from metal stands. Some of the patients had fluid flowing into them from more than one IV bag and the fluids were different colors. It looked as if they were getting a transfusion of rainbow juice.
The patients were quiet. The heart monitors were also silent. Soft music drifted from the ceiling and sounded like something a classical composer would create. I scanned the room, then I focused on the patients. Each wore a yellow patient gown; each person had deep wrinkles plowed by years of life.
A thought wormed its way into my brain. Morgues were places where they kept dead people. This seemed like a morgue for the almost dead. A chill spread through me, freezing me from the inside out. A glance at the girls told me the scene had the same effect on them. Andi was pale. Brenda found something on the floor to look at. Daniel was different. He kept his head up and strolled to an elderly lady reclined in a hospital bed. Her hair was a flat silver, her skin the color of parchment.
He smiled. She smiled back. It reminded me of two children meeting for the first time and becoming friends. The kid took her hand. The sight of it filled me with huge pride. It almost brought me to tears. My breath caught. My eyes burned.
My heart went out to the old woman in the bed. She clung to a child’s doll. She held it up for Daniel to see, then wiggled it so the doll seemed to dance. Just like a child would do. Then the old woman giggled. The giggle was as light as a feather and floated like one through the room. I glanced around the place again and noticed that several of the old folks had a child’s toy on the bed with them. The woman giggled again and she sounded just like a little girl—
My stomach contracted into a knot. My knees shook and gave up their strength. I bent forward and fought an almost irresistible urge to vomit on the clean, high-polished floor.
“Oh, dear God.” I said that so softly that I was surprised to learn that Andi and Brenda heard it.
A hand on my shoulder. “Tank, what’s wrong?” I didn’t have to look to know it was Andi’s hand.
I raised a finger, straightened. Took two deep breaths and walked from the room. Andi and Brenda followed; Daniel did not.
“Tank. Talk to me.” Andi was by my side. Brenda stood a few feet in front of me.
I stumbled back a few steps until my back touched the corridor wall, then my legs decided to quit. I slid to the floor.
Brenda tried a more direct approach to get my attention. “Cowboy, so help me if you don’t start talking I’m gonna hit you so hard your grandparents will scream.”
“Is it the old people?” Andi said.
I tilted my head up. “They’re not old. They’re . . . they’re young! Dear God, they’re kids! Children!”
Chapter Ten
The Fountain of Elderliness
Helsa brought a cup of black fluid that I assumed was coffee. I know coffee and this wasn’t it. I drank it anyway, hoping it would put the steel back in my spine.
“You understand?” Helsa sat beside me. We were in the cafeteria. In the corner. Far from the police officers, nurses, doctors, and other people who worked in this place.
“I don’t,” Andi said.
“Me, neither.” Brenda sounded irritated again. “Someone better start talkin’ or I’m gonna lose my kind and gentle reputation.”
“Tell me I’m wrong, Helsa. For the love of God, tell me I’m wrong.”
She sat in the chair next to me and took my hand. “I can’t.”
After a deep breath, Helsa looked at Andi, Brenda, and Daniel. “What do you remember of my visit to your world?”
Andi rose to the bait. “You were a kid. Your eyes changed color there as they do here—”
“Younger,” Daniel said. “You got younger.”
Helsa nodded. “That’s right.”
A few seconds passed and Brenda began to swear. I think she used every profanity she knew. Andi sat like a statue for a few moments, then asked, “So these are kids from our world? How long have they been here?”
“The ones in that room have been on this side—in our universe—for about two weeks. A few longer; a few shorter.”
“How do they end up here?”
“We’re not sure. Probably the same way you did.”
“Can’t you send them back?”
“We’ve tried . . . we would if we could.”
Andi never shied away from asking tough questions. Apparently the steel in my spine had moved to her. “How—“ She stopped, then took another running start at the question. “How old was the person Daniel was talking to?”
Helsa had to reach deep for the answer. She pursed her lips, blinked several times, then, “Eight.”
“Eighty?” Brenda jumped in. “You said ‘eighty,’ right?”
“No. Eight years old. Many have already died of old age. The older they are when they get here, the faster they age.”
I braced myself for another barrage of curses but it never came. Instead, Brenda leaned forward and covered her face. She reminded me of a deflated balloon.
My turn to ask the difficult question: “How long before we begin to change?”
Helsa gave my hand a squeeze. “It’s already started.”
One more question from me, but I was already sure of what I was going to hear. “Where are the adults that came over?”
Helsa wasn’t the kind to soft peddle things. “Dead.”
* * *
When a person hears something that doesn’t make much sense, it’s only natural to call it nonsense and get back to life. That was my first reaction, but ever since I pushed together with my friends I’d seen so many things that didn’t make sense that I lost my ability to be surprised. Hearing that we would grow old quickly just like Helsa grew younger when she was in our universe was unwelcome news. I wanted to call it nonsense, but I couldn’t. Truth was, I was already feeling a little older, but I figured that was due to an already tough day.
There wasn’t much conversation after that. Helsa asked us to tell her all the details of what had happened in Newland before we were hijacked outta our own world. She was so different from the little girl I used to call Littlefoot. Clearly her mind was running at top speed; me, not so much.
Food arrived—at least we didn’t have to stand in line and fill our own plates—I was ready to dig in. It looked familiar. There were mashed potatoes on my plate, but they weren’t white. They weren’t the color of sweet potatoes, either. To me they looked gray, like
they had been left in the field too long. I’m not a picky eater so I gave it a taste. It was glorious. Slightly sweet. Still, they were gray potatoes. Also on the plate were string beans, and thank the good Lord, they were the right shade of green. A nice salad of greens was nestled beside the beans. I usually think of salads as rabbit food, but I had been taught to eat what was on my plate. There were other things, none of which looked like meat. So I asked.
“I should have mentioned this earlier.” Helsa grinned. “No one eats meat here.”
“You’re all vegetarians?” I felt like a man who had just been robbed.
“Yes. We don’t kill animals for food.”
I looked at Andi who seemed fine with the revelation. I glanced at Daniel, he looked distracted and didn’t care about what he ate—and I’ve seen the kid down his fair share of hot dogs and hamburgers. Then there was Brenda. I studied her as she studied the stuff on her plate. She looked ready to cut her wrists.
“We gotta find a way home,” Brenda said.
Helsa let us eat then said, “You mentioned a crazy man at the kitchen window of the hotel and the restaurant.”
“Yes, probably just some homeless guy. He had some issues.”
“He was crazier than an outhouse rat.” Brenda didn’t bother looking up from her plate. Her description was a tad cruel, but I couldn’t argue with it.
“Tockity man,” Daniel said. He hadn’t done much talking of late, especially since we left the hospital ward. He had that distant look in his eyes. Something was working in the kid’s brain.
“Tockity man?” Helsa asked.
“It was something he said—“
“Ranted.” Andi wasn’t bothered by the food and had made some good headway into cleaning her plate.
I carried on. “Both times we saw him, he said, ‘Tock-tick, tock-tick, tockity, tockity, tick-tick.’ He got some of the words backwards. Andi’s right. The man was raving.”
“And he had an eye-patch?”
“Yep. Hand made job. Cut it out of a Corn Flakes box and tied it on with a string.”
“He didn’t get the words backwards,” Helsa said. “That line is from a children’s poem.” She closed her eyes then spoke as if reading words printed on the inside of her eyelids:
“Tock, tock, tock goes the clock,
Tick, tick, tick, the hands make their pick.
Around the face the hands do move;
Our work the heart does prove.
Tock-tick, tock-tick,
Tockity, tockity, tick-tick,
What life will you pick?”
Andi looked puzzled. “I see your children’s poems are as confusing and unsettling as ours.”
“It is very old, and I’m translating into your language so it doesn’t sound the same aloud as it does in my head. It meant more two-hundred years ago than it does today. I haven’t heard it since I was a child. I mean a child in my world.”
“Sick minds are attracted to sick ideas,” Brenda said. “I once did a tat on a guy that was nothing more than, ‘And down will come Baby.”
“You mean like the line in Rock-a-Bye Baby?” I always hated that lullaby.
“Yes. There are variations of the song, but most describe a baby in a cradle, hung in a tree and when the wind blows it rocks the cradle, then it mentions the bough—the tree limb—breaks, the baby and cradle fall.”
Helsa leaned back as if Andi’s word came with a stench. “That’s horrible.”
“No one would argue with you,” Andi said.
“Mothers still sing it to their babies without knowing what they’re singing.” Brenda’s grumpiness had moved up a level.
I decided to get the conversation back on track. “So why would Tockity Man say those words to us?”
Helsa shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s the first I’ve heard of him . . .” She trailed off and that made my antennas go up. “Unless . . .”
“Unless what?” I was desperate for answers.
“I need to check on a few things.” Helsa stood. “You should rest. You’ve had a challenging day.”
“Challenging?” Brenda said. “That’s one word for it.”
Helsa patted Brenda on the shoulder. To my relief, she pulled her hand back without a single bite mark. “Brenda, you are important.”
She said nothing more, but pivoted and walked from the cafeteria.
Chapter Eleven
Useless Hands
Helsa sent someone to show us our rooms, which were in the same building. They reminded me of dorm rooms. My room had a wide bed, a dresser, a small desk, a closet, and a bathroom. I made use of the latter, then stripped down and tried to make use of the bed. The mattress was firm, just the way I liked it. I needed sleep. Nothing is more taxing on mind and body than over-the-top emotions, and my mind and body had had it. The oblivion of sleep was what I wanted.
I was to be deprived. Although the bed was comfortable, my back ached, my stomach was sour, and my brain was doing jumping jacks. Every time I closed my eyes, images flashed on the movie screen of my brain: images of Brenda talking about the Batman syndrome, pictures of the Tockity man standing at the hotel and the café window, and—this was the worst of all—a memory of the children dressed in old bodies, slowly dying in the hospital wing.
I stared at the ceiling through the dim light provided by thick curtains. Something warm and wet trickled down the sides of my face. Children. When that realization hit me, I considered it the worst blow I had ever received. My insides quivered; my brain became Jell-O, and I was feeling the same way again.
It took me awhile to admit it, but I was wrestling with a different problem, one that embarrasses me to admit. As I mentioned, each member of the team has a spiritual gift. That’s my phrase for it. Brenda sometimes draws the future; Andi often sees patterns hidden from the rest of us mere mortals; Daniel sometimes sees angels and the like. And me, as I said before, I occasionally heal people. I have no control over the when, the why, or the where. It’s a great gift when it works, but since I don’t know when it works it confuses me and that makes me shy away from trying.
Am I afraid to fail? No. Yes. I don’t know. Perhaps this doesn’t make sense. When I was still in college, I had to take a class in basic psychology. Almost everyone did. The professor told us about a study where two monkeys were given a shock, every now and again. They shocked one monkey on a regular schedule. Same time of day, and same number of times. That monkey didn’t like it, but learned to live with it. The other monkey was shocked at random. That poor thing went nuts.
I don’t admit this often, but more and more I feel like the second monkey.
Sleep finally came, but it was loaded with extra-real dreams, not one of which I liked. I didn’t sleep long, maybe a few hours. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. The bed was done with me and I was done with it.
I swung my feet over the side of the bed, then stopped short. The pain in my back had grown sharper, and a new set of pains had set in to my knees and one of my feet—the foot I injured playing football. It hurt more now than it did then, and trust me, it hurt a lot back then.
It took two tries for me to hoist my bulk off the mattress. I took a few steps and each one hurt, but as I moved along the joints loosened up some. My first thought was to blame the mattress. That changed when I hobbled into the bathroom and turned on the light. The image in the mirror made me forget why I had gone into the bathroom in the first place. The man in the mirror was me all right, but I had changed. Not greatly, but I’ve been looking at my mug for over two decades and I could tell that my skin seemed a tad more loose, and my hair a bit thinner. I leaned closer to the mirror. There were wrinkles around the eyes and my hair was longer.
I had aged. I didn’t need to think that through. Helsa had told us we would, but I didn’t expect it to happen during a short nap. I could tell this was an uneven process. I had grown some beard stubble, but not enough to match the age of my face. Why that should be, I have no idea, and I doubted I could figure it out
.
I like to put things in the best possible light so I told myself how glad I was that I hadn’t slept longer. I also realized whatever it was we were supposed to do, we needed to get to it. Tick-tock, tock-tick, the clock. I now understood what the Tockity man meant. And I didn’t like it.
No more wasting time. I doubted I had any time to waste. I dressed again and left my room. I knew my destination and I was there in short order, maybe a little slower than I would have made the trip when I first got to this place, but I didn’t let any moss grow on me.
I didn’t use the communication panel on the side of the doorway to the hospital ward. I just walked in. Nurses looked at me but said nothing. I had a feeling they were thinking, “He’ll be in here permanently soon enough.”
No lingering for me. I came to work; to lay it all on the line. If I failed, it would be a failure of trying to do something right.
No need to tell the nurses what I intended to do. They wouldn’t understand me anyway. I stopped at the nearest bed. A man who looked to be well north of ninety met my gaze. I doubt he saw me. Cataracts covered his eyes. I took one of his hands in my mine and laid my other hand on his forehead.
I prayed.
I prayed for all I was worth. Some minutes passed before I could open my eyes. No change. The cataracts were still there, and the old man/kid was still the same as I first saw him. No healing.
I moved to the next bed, then the next. Same result, by which I mean no results. Maybe my gift didn’t work in this universe. Maybe I forgot how to do it right. Maybe I had fallen out of favor with God. My eyes grew wet again. Still, I moved from one patient to the next doing absolutely no good at all. The children were all dying of old age.
Time walked by, tock-tick, tockity, tockity, tick, tick, tick. With each tick I felt more despair and more anger. I didn’t think I could slip lower. Turns out, I could.
The door to the room opened and a familiar looking young man walked in. He wore a robe and was barefoot. His hair hung to his ears and was styled in the I-just-rolled-outta-bed look. I wondered if he was a new patient, then the ceiling collapsed on me. Daniel.
