by Alton Gansky
The young man stepped to the bedside of the eight-year-old kid who looked eighty. He took her hand and just stood there. A weak giggle rose from the bed and I stood glued to the floor as Daniel stroked the patient’s hair.
If I had died at that moment, I would have considered it a blessing worthy of the highest praise. One of the nurses wheeled a chair over to Daniel so he could sit vigil. He took it. Sat. Then began to weep as the heart monitor next the bed flat-lined.
I limped to his side put a hand first on his shoulder then on the dead woman’s arm. I needed to speak, but I had no words; I needed to grant comfort but had none to give. I was useless.
Daniel laid his head on the side of the bed, resting it on their clasped hands.
My weeping joined Daniel’s.
* * *
Brenda and Andi walked through the doors. Apparently they didn’t bother to check-in, either. They took three steps in, then saw us. Daniel hadn’t moved; his head still rested on the bed. The dead girl/woman had been staring at the ceiling. I closed her eyes. I wish I could have done more. All I could do was stand near Daniel until the nurses thought enough time had passed and came to take her away.
Brenda stopped in her tracks. She was holding Daniel’s clothes; clothes that fit an eight-year-old. The young man in the robe must have looked familiar to her but it was still impossible to believe. I believed it. I could see gray in Brenda’s hair and wrinkles in Andi’s face. They weren’t old, but they had definitely aged.
Brenda’s eyes shifted from Daniel to the person in the bed, to the heart monitor, to me, then back to Daniel. “Oh, baby boy,” she said. She stepped beside Daniel, bent and hugged him. That’s when the sniffing started. Andi came to my side, took a look at me, then let the tears flow.
“I couldn’t do anything.” I whispered the words, at the moment it was the only volume setting I had. “I tried, Andi, I really tried. I prayed for each one. I tried to heal them, but it didn’t work. I feel useless.”
She took my arm, leaned in and rested her head on my shoulder. Any other time, any other place, any other universe, I would have been over the moon. I was none of that. I was just heartbroken.
Minutes tock-ticked by, then an idea occurred to me. “We have to get these people back.”
“How?” Andi kept squeezing my arm like she feared her legs would give way.
“I don’t know. I just know we have to do it. I can’t let these kids die one by one, and I can’t let . . . others . . . be brought over—”
“Tank?” Andi let go and turned to face me. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure yet . . .” A fresh thought arrived. It was like someone was dictating directions to me. “Andi, I need your help. You too, Brenda.”
Daniel finally raised his head. “What about me?” He wiped his eyes dry.
“I always need you, buddy.” I started to call him “little buddy,” but that didn’t seem to fit anymore.
“We have to get Daniel back home.” Brenda sounded desperate. That made sense. We were all facing the same death. “Littlefoot returned to her proper age when she got back to her world; maybe we’ll do the same when we get back to ours.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” My mind was hitting on all cylinders. “Andi, talk to the other patients. Ask questions. Find a pattern. We need a pattern.”
“Daniel needs some clothes to wear.”
“I bet Helsa can get him something.” A motion to my right drew my attention to a nurse on a phone. A few moments later, Helsa walked in.
Chapter Twelve
Doing Something Even if it’s Wrong
My mother used to say that a watched pot never boils. Of course, she meant the water in the pot, but I never corrected her. She used to say that a lot. In our family, she was the one that had all the patience. I’m pretty good at patience, but not great. Especially if lives were at stake, I get positively antsy.
Andi was my watched pot. Helsa, Brenda, Daniel—Helsa brought a police uniform for Daniel to wear and a pair of shoes—and I went to the cafeteria, not to eat, but to meet. It was easier to talk around a cafeteria table. More elbow room.
We did very little talking. I didn’t know where to start. “Hey Daniel, what’s it feel like to go from kid to teenager overnight? Are you diggin’ that?” That would be as stupid as it sounds. So instead, we played with our drinks and I tried to get my brain to be better than it was. It was wearing me out. I had only been up a few hours and I was already wishing for a nap. Growing older ain’t for sissies.
Brenda broke the silence. “You gotta plan, Cowboy?”
“Not really. Just a few thousand questions.”
“Me neither.”
“We have to save the kids.” Daniel’s voice was nearly an octave deeper. It was interesting to hear, but I wanted my little buddy to be, well, little again.
“I know.” I rubbed my eyes. My vision wasn’t as sharp as I was used too. No doubt I needed glasses. “I’ll do anything I can.” I’m pretty secure about myself. I know I’m not the brain in our group. I’m fine with that. I’m just a big lug God has seen fit to use. At least, that’s how I saw it.
“We got here,” Daniel said. “We can get back.”
He lifted his eyes and looked around. From time to time Daniel sees angels and I’ve been with the kid long enough to know he was looking for his friends. His expression told me he was disappointed.
* * *
Through the open door to the cafeteria I saw Andi and Helsa approaching. I was just getting used to seeing Helsa as an adult; it would take longer for me to get used to seeing an older Andi. Still, she looked good.
Andi walked with her head down as if following a line on the floor. Others might look at her and think, “Uh-oh, she has bad news.” They’d be wrong. Andi’s brain worked in a different way than the rest of us. Her brain was burning rubber and I took that to mean something good.
Andi sat across the table and next to Brenda; Helsa sat next to me.
We waited for Andi to speak. I knew she would when she got her thoughts in order. I didn’t have to wait long.
Andi said, “Okay, I’m gonna spew.”
“Eww,” Daniel said.
“I don’t mean that. I’m gonna spew what I’ve learned and then we can try to sort it out. Okay?”
No one objected.
“I’ve talked to as many of the patients as could speak. A few were showing signs of senility but even then, I got a few things. Tank, you were right, they are children. The youngest is six and the oldest is twelve. There is no pattern to their ages. It’s a mix of those ages and all of the ones in between. There is roughly an even ratio of males to females but there are a few more girls than guys. Again, no real pattern there. It’s what we’d expect if we visited any hospital: girls outnumber boys by a slight margin. So whoever or whatever is doing this is no respecter of persons or genders.”
“Is it only children who are dragged into this world?” I felt silly the moment I asked it.
“Think about it, Tank. You, Brenda and I are adults and we came over just like Daniel.
“The adults have died off already,” I said. Those words tasted bitter.
“Right. We established that yesterday.”
I remembered. I just wanted her to know I was listening. Either that or my memory was getting a little wobbly.
Andi went on, her eyes looking around the table but never really seeing us. She was immersed in thought. “All of them are from Newland. That realization is important. If we had people here from different towns, states, even other parallel universes, it would mean the problem is too large for us to handle. Of course, it might still be too much for us, but at least we’re dealing with just one place that is somehow tied to this reality.”
She paused. “Remember the mousey hotel manager we met when we came into town?”
“I do,” Brenda said. “She needed a good backhand to the face, if you ask me.”
“Because . . .” Andi prompted.
“Because she tried to run us off, that’s why.” Brenda said. “You were there. If she could have shoved us out the door, she would have done it.”
“And Tiffany at the café?” Andi said.
“Same thing. She tried to get us to head out of town.”
“They don’t like strangers,” I said.
“Sorry, Tank. You’re wrong. So are you, Brenda. And as much as I hate to admit it, so was I. They weren’t trying to get us to move on because they didn’t like tourists, they were trying to save us—to keep us from becoming the next set of victims.”
That was a punch to the gut. Like Brenda, I assumed they just didn’t like our looks.
“They could have been clearer about that.” Brenda was not ready to give up a perfectly good bad mood.
“Not really, Brenda. They couldn’t say, ‘Enjoy your stay in Newland, North Carolina, oh, and don’t let anyone make you disappear.’” Andi took a deep breath, as if revealing this information was wearing her out. “They have lost family members and sometimes their children without the slightest hint of what happened to them. We have the advantage of knowing a little about where we are.”
“I misjudged them,” I said.
Andi agreed. “We all did.”
Helsa said, “When all this began a few months ago, I did some checking. To our knowledge, people from your world only show up in New Land and no place else in our world.”
Her eyes turned yellow. That was a new one.
“Not many days ago,” Andi said, “we sat in a university auditorium to listen to the professor talk about alternate dimensions and parallel universes. As you know, I made the PowerPoint slides and helped organize his material, just like I’ve done for the professor over the last few years. He initially planned to include some controversial material, but took it out about a week before we went to Tampa. He couldn’t provide enough evidence that the events he planned to describe were in fact real and not pure fiction. I helped with that research. Very interesting, but not substantial.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Okay, just understand that some of this may be real and some of it might be pure baloney.”
Andi took a deep breath as if she were planning on spewing information again. Which she was.
“There have been reports of people, groups, and even civilizations that have vanished. In 1872, the steamboat Iron Mountain disappeared while making its way in the Mississippi. She was never heard from again. Unfortunately, only one newspaper reported the vanishing. So did it really happen? Who knows?
“In 1947 a small plane crashed on Mt. Rainier. When searchers found the crash site they discovered evidence of injury, but no people, no bodies, no footprints, and no indication that predators had hauled bodies away. The pilot and passengers were just gone.”
Andi fiddled with Brenda’s napkin. We gave her a moment to collect her thoughts. “In the late 1800s, on a farm outside Gallatin, Tennessee, a farmer named David Lang went into his field one day and—in full view of his family—disappeared. Some say the family could hear his voice in the field calling for help, but they could never find him. That mystery was never solved.
“It’s a long list,” Andi continued. “The Eskimo village of Anjikuni was found empty of all its residents, but everything they owned was left behind. A large group of Spanish soldiers vanished in 1711. Don’t even get me started on the Bermuda Triangle.”
“Are you saying that all these things really happened?” Brenda asked.
“No, I’m not. But we’ve seen enough in our adventures to make me wonder. The professor, of course, dismissed these stories, but I had a feeling he wondered if he might be wrong about that. But you know him—he was the poster child for logic and the scientific method.”
This kind of talk tends to fry my brain, but I had a sense that Andi had more connections to make.
“Man, I could use a cup of coffee,” Andi said. She looked worn out.
I started to rise, but Helsa beat me to it. She returned with more coffee for every one, including Daniel. I still didn’t know if it was really coffee, but it looked and smelled close enough.
A couple of sips later, Andi continued. “I tried to nail down exact times when the kids were brought over or sent over or whatever the right verb is, but we’re dealing with children and they don’t fixate on time like adults do. If some of the adults were still alive, I might have made more progress. Anyway, I learned that there is no clear pattern. It’s not like they arrive on a timetable. Helsa confirmed that for me. They keep records of arrival times here. The time between arrivals vary and I can’t figure out a pattern on that. For all I know, new folk may show up before lunch or not for a week. I doubt time here is exactly the same as home.” She turned to Helsa. “How long does it take for your world to circle the sun?”
“Three hundred and seventy days, of course.”
Andi did blink at that. “How long is a day?”
“Twenty-six hours.”
Andi turned to the rest of us. “The year here is five days longer, and each day is roughly two hours longer.” She rubbed her face. “I imagine a minute here is different than a minute back home. It would take me some time to figure all that out, and there’s a good chance I’d fail even if I tried.”
“So we got nothin’,” Brenda said.
“Very little, I agree, but I did notice that the transition place, if that’s a good term for it, was not always the same. We were in Tiffany’s Café when we were snatched; others were in front of the café, at the end of town, in their homes, or some other place.” Andi slouched in her seat as if telling us all this had drained her. Maybe it did, but I’m pretty sure she was feeling like a failure.
Andi sighed in a way that broke my heart.
“You did good, Andi.”
“Thanks, Tank, but I’ve come up short—“
“Paper.” It was Daniel.
I looked at him. He held the watch he had taken from the professor’s room as a keepsake. Initially the watch proved too big for the arm of a ten-year-old. Since Daniel’s unwelcome growth spirt, the watch almost fit. Not quite, but almost.
“What?” I said.
“Paper. Please.” Daniel didn’t look at me. Instead, he gazed at Helsa.
She nodded, rose, and left the cafeteria only to return a few moments later with a couple of pads of paper. She also carried a pen and a pencil, covering the bases, I supposed, and set them in front of Daniel.
“Whatcha going to do with that, baby?” Brenda said.
His answer was an action: he pushed the material in front of Brenda. “Draw. The town. Draw the town.”
“I’m sorry, Daniel, but I didn’t pay much attention to the place.”
“Tank did. He took a walk.”
Brenda looked at me, then at Andi. “I don’t get it.”
“Draw.” Daniel was insistent. Usually he kept to himself, living much of his life in his own mind, but he had no problem jumping into the middle of things if he had something to contribute.
Brenda took the pencil and started by drawing the main street we used to get into town. I outlined my walk, mentioning buildings I had seen and houses I had passed. Brenda added those to the map. Twenty minutes later we had a pretty decent map of Newland.
The moment Brenda set the pencil down, Daniel grabbed the paper pad and pushed it in front of Andi. She blinked a few times, looked at me, met Brenda’s eyes, then let her gaze settle on Daniel.
“I think I get it,” she said. With that, Andi picked up the pencil.
Chapter Thirteen
The Wisdom of Daniel
I was pacing, my patience gone. I had a feeling that we were about to cross a threshold of understanding and wanted to pray that we would recognize it. I pray on my feet, a lot. Pacing helps me focus. I’m sure some psychologist somewhere could tell me the why and wherefore of that, but I wasn’t interested in knowing then and I’m no more interested in knowing now.
Andi was putting little circles o
n the map Brenda had drawn. Each circle represented some child from our world who who was dying in this world. Next to each circle Andi wrote two numbers in tiny script.
“This number is the subject’s age; this one the day when the transfer occurred.” There were many circles with only numbers, the patients didn’t know or couldn’t remember the day and time their problems began.
I assumed that the circles would be all over the proverbial map but even I could see a trend. The markers formed a line from Tiffany’s Café to the old church. Another line was formed going north from the church and into the residential area I had walked a couple of days ago. Granted, these lines were a bit squiggly, but it was a pattern.
“There may be a time pattern after all.” Andi didn’t look up from the hand-drawn map. “I’ve included our event in Tiffany’s. It’s the most recent event we know of.” She let her gaze linger on the paper. I leaned over the table for a closer look. “Odd.”
“What’s odd?” I leaned even closer to the page.
“I was expecting a straight line, or a clump of events, but I don’t see that at all.” Andi pointed at the old church with the pretty steeple. “If I . . . Can it be that simple?”
“I don’t see it, so it’s not all that simple to me,” I said.
“It looks like all the events fan out from the church building, like spokes from a hub.” The earliest events happened in the residential area, the most recent in the heart of town.”
“And what does that mean?” Helsa asked.
“Notice how the clumps of circles—people—are associated on one line, then the next taken are a little distance from the first. The same can be said for the other small groups.” She scratched her head. “Think of the church as a lighthouse with a beam of light that swings in a big circle. Maybe I can extrapolate the next line—the line along which another abduction might occur.”
