A Pair of Docks

by Jennifer Ellis

  Except that he was with us in Mark’s future and there was blood and arrows, Abbey thought.

  “After he dropped me off, I ran into the school and Googled ‘Mantis’. Did you know that mantis means prophet? This guy Quentin Steinam has made his living predicting what will happen in the computer industry and being on the inside when it does…like he has inside knowledge of what will happen. Knowledge you could get, say, from the stones.”

  “Wait a second,” Abbey said. “Are you saying you think Quentin Steinam is Mantis? ‘Cause we think Sylvain Salvador is Mantis.”

  “Or maybe they’re friends. I don’t know. I just think that if someone knew how the stones worked, and could see the future, they could seriously use it to their advantage financially. And I find it kind of funny this guy Steinam has had so much success predicting what to invest in,” Caleb said.

  “And what do you mean the stones aren’t working?”

  “After I left the note at the house, I came here and decided to just go through a couple of times while I waited for you. I wanted to see if I went to the same future as I did before, or a different one. But I didn’t go anywhere.”

  “We agreed we weren’t going to do that,” Simon said. “After last night.”

  Caleb threw his arms in the air. “I know, I know, but come on, the two of you have seen your futures. I haven’t. It’s not fair. And anyway, you aren’t listening. The stones aren’t working. We need to try again. And Mark needs to go first.” The words poured from Caleb and he practically shook with excitement.

  “What?” asked Abbey.

  “We need to follow Mark through. We need to know why Mantis wants to find him so bad.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Abbey.

  Mark had already taken a step backward, shaking his head.

  Abbey crossed her arms over her chest. “Mark’s already had a bad vision of his future—and we were in it. We, as in the current Abbey, Simon, and Caleb, not the future Abbey, Simon, and Caleb. There were people dying in Mark’s vision, and the date in his vision was tomorrow. Maybe if we don’t use the stones again, none of it will ever happen.” But even as she said no, even though she’d sworn to herself she’d never use the stones again, now that she was near them she felt that strange pull again, like the stones were calling to her, like she needed to know what would happen.

  Caleb ignored her and addressed Mark. “Come on, buddy, please. Your mom sent us to help you. If we work together, we can change the future. If it all happens tomorrow, then we need to know today.”

  You can kill yourself trying to change the future, thought Abbey; that’s what the future Caleb had said. Now, hearing Mark’s future, that possibility seemed all the more potentially real to her. But she hadn’t completely believed the future Caleb. There had been something in his face, something he hadn’t told her.

  “Caleb, we don’t know that,” Simon said, but he, too, looked like he was leaning toward trying it.

  “Come on guys, we have to try,” said Caleb. “We need to figure this out. Everything we learn brings us closer. We’ll just go through for a few minutes. We can protect Mark.”

  Abbey glared at her twin. “This is a bad idea, Caleb. How can we protect him? Or ourselves?”

  “Ab, Mantis could show up any second and take Mark. This might be our only chance to see his future.”

  Mark started to cringe and moan.

  “What we should do is call the police,” Abbey said.

  “The police will just take Mark away and put him into some home somewhere. And then we’ll never get to see his future.” Caleb turned to Mark again and donned a beatific smile, a smile that had won the hearts of so many teachers and girls over the years. “If it’s bad, we just run back as fast as we can.”

  Mark stood frozen, his face almost sagging in angst. “But there was blood and shooting and we were all wearing exactly the same clothes as we are today…except you.” Mark extended a shaking finger at Caleb.

  “Maybe that means today’s not the day of the shooting. Simon wears a black shirt every day of the week, and Abbey has barely taken that sweater off since she got it. I’m sure they’ll be wearing the same thing tomorrow,” Caleb reasoned. “We can go do recon.”

  Abbey stared at Caleb’s bright green Poison Spider Bicycle t-shirt. His pupils seemed oddly dilated. Like he was high. Or like the stones were pulling at him, too. “You said the stones aren’t working anyway.”

  “I think they are now,” Caleb said. “I could feel a shift in the air as you came up the hill, I don’t know, like static electricity, like they’d been turned off and now they’re back on. We should give it a try.”

  Abbey opened her mouth to object, but suddenly Mark closed his eyes, moaned, and staggered onto the stones. His disappearance was expected, but it still made Abbey gasp.

  Caleb followed Mark without hesitation, and then Simon grabbed Abbey’s elbow and pulled her along with him over the stones.

  After the now familiar jolt and whoosh, Abbey opened her eyes to swirling fog. Caleb and Mark stood to her right, their mouths open. She sensed Simon on her left. The landscape had an odd green hue, which seemed to be emanating from the ground, and it seemed that were no natural features except the fog and, oddly, the occasional lone boulder. It was neither daylight nor night, but rather seemed to be a late stage of dusk or an early stage of twilight, where light could be sensed, but objects in the distance couldn’t be made out. A few hundred meters ahead of them was a bonfire, surrounded by three figures in cloaks.

  “Okay…this has just taken a turn for the really weird,” said Simon.

  Chapter 10

  Finding Dr. Bed Truck

  The three cloaked figures turned to look at the new arrivals. One of the cloaked figures stepped away from the fire and started walking toward Abbey, Caleb, Simon, and Mark. Abbey tensed to jump back on the stones, but the person approaching was a remarkably cute, blond young woman with freckles and lively green eyes. She felt Caleb and Simon pull out of their customary slouches into more erect positions.

  “Welcome to Nowhere,” she said. “I’m Sandy. It’s my job to greet the next arrivals.” Then her eyes widened. “But, maybe you aren’t staying.” She gestured to the stones that were still faintly visible amidst the swirling fog behind them. “I’ve heard this is possible, in theory.”

  Abbey glanced over at the completely flummoxed expressions on Caleb’s and Simon’s faces.

  Mark had placed one foot in front of the other and was rocking back and forth between them, shaking his head and staring at the ground.

  “Sorry, excuse me. What do you mean by ‘this is possible in theory’?” Abbey asked.

  Sandy cast a quick look over her shoulder, but the other figures by the fire hadn’t moved. “I’ve heard that occasionally querents see this as their future. They return home knowing they will create paradox and will have to come here to stay. It’s like an early-warning system. There’s only been a few cases, though.”

  “What are querents?” Abbey wished Caleb would take over, but he seemed stunned into some sort of silence.

  Sandy cocked her head at them. “The witches that use the stones, of course. We called them querents in my day. Or seekers. What do you call them now?”

  Abbey pulled her eyebrows together. “We aren’t witches. We just found the stones.”

  Sandy elevated her eyebrows. “Well, you must have some witch blood in you, or the stones wouldn’t have worked. You probably wouldn’t have even seen them. This is a warning to whoever came through the stones first. Don’t try to change the future on this side of the stones, or you’ll be trapped here like the rest of us fools.” The woman seemed to be examining Simon very closely.

  Mark had started to rock more vigorously, and when the word trapped came out of Sandy’s mouth, he dropped into a crouch with a moan, pulling at his ears with his hands.

  The woman squinted at him. “I assume it was him, then. You should talk to your guardian.”r />
  “You mean our parents? He’s not our brother,” Simon said.

  “You don’t know much about the stones, do you?” asked Sandy. “You need to learn fast, or you’re going to get yourselves into serious trouble. Every set of stones has three caretakers—a Guardian, a Scholar, and an Energy. The Energy can’t go very far away from the stones or they won’t work, so the Energy usually lives near the stones. The Energy knows who the Guardian is. It’s the Guardian’s job to protect the stones and to explain the rules to new querents so they don’t get hurt. I suggest you find him before it’s too late.”

  Mark was breathing rapidly in and out through his nose in some sort of quasi-hyperventilation move. Caleb still stood slack-jawed, staring at the woman. “What is this place?” he managed to stutter.

  Sandy pursed her lips and darted another glance over her shoulder. “Here is pretty much nothing. It’s like time purgatory. Other than breathing and talking to each other, there’s nothing to do. Time doesn’t pass. We don’t age. We don’t eat or sleep. It is like we’ve become nothing as well. If the air weren’t oxygen, I’m not sure if we’d even have to breathe. You’d better go.”

  “I agree,” said Simon.

  Mark had tucked his head down into his chest while he hugged his knees, and seemed to be almost having a seizure.

  “We’re going now, Mark. Can you get up and walk?”

  Mark didn’t respond.

  Simon looked skyward as he clenched his jaw. He leaned down and spoke in Mark’s ear. “We have to go. Caleb and I are each going to take one of your arms and carry you.” Together Caleb and Simon managed to haul Mark the few meters back to the stones, and then disappeared with the bulky man flailing between them.

  Abbey looked at Sandy. The other women by the fire, seeing the departure of Simon, Caleb and Mark, had started approaching at an alarming pace. “Can’t you just follow me back?”

  The woman shook her head. “No. The stones no longer work for us. You’ve got to go now.”

  “What if you took my hand?” For some reason she wanted to help this woman.

  “Go. They’re coming. They’ve figured out you’re not one of us, and they think you can get us out of here. But you probably can’t. If you want to help me, go home and find the Energy and the Guardian and tell them you have to smoke on the docks. Hurry.” Smoke on the docks? What was the woman talking about? The woman gave her a push and Abbey jumped onto the stones. Abbey felt the usual lurch and heard the woman call after her, “You can only change the future from the present, unless—” Abbey found herself back in the leafy green of the forest behind their house again. Mark was sitting in the dirt, his face in his hands. Caleb and Simon both stood with their hands on their waists, hunched over.

  “The guy’s a brick,” said Caleb.

  “That was totally freaky,” said Simon when he’d recovered his breath. “Do you think any of that Guardian, Energy, witch blood stuff is true?”

  Caleb returned to an upright position. “Well, Great-Aunt Marge was pretty out there, and we were just in the weirdest green foggy place ever.”

  Abbey pursed her lips. Trust Caleb to make a joke out of it.

  He gave a weak smile, and looked at least marginally pale. “You have to admit, none of this makes any sort of rational sense, especially that last place. Let’s go way out on a limb and assume it’s true. The woman said the Energy has to live near the stones. What if Mrs. Forrester is the Energy? She clearly knew about the stones and she lives right here.”

  “But Mrs. Forrester is in the hospital,” replied Abbey. “Why are the stones still working?”

  “They weren’t, remember?” Caleb said. “They weren’t working until you guys came back with Mark. What if Mark is the Energy? Maybe that’s why Mantis wants him.”

  Abbey put her hands on her hips. All of the pieces of the last few days whirled about in her head. She felt like she might explode. Her scientific mind wanted to explain this, wanted to put it in a box—a neatly labeled box of rational explanations. Parallel universes, relativity, time travel, something. Definitely not witchcraft. Definitely not feelings. But at that moment, she couldn’t find a rational box in which to stuff any of it. Occam’s razor: The correct answer is the simplest. Right now the simplest answer might be witchcraft. She sank to the ground next to Mark. Find the Guardian, the woman had said. Abbey sighed. “Okay, this is absolutely crazy, but let’s say Mark is the Energy. How do we find the Guardian?”

  Simon sat on a large, gray rock next to Mark. “I’m willing to bet he or she is one of the three people that Mrs. Forrester used to be friends with,” Simon said. “It would sure suck if Mantis is the Guardian. Because he hasn’t seemed like he’s been trying to guide us, except right into danger. What about Mrs. Forrester’s drawings? What about that one with the doctor?”

  Abbey yanked the piece of paper from her pocket. “I don’t know. It seems to say phone Doctor Bed Truck.”

  “Well, let’s go look Bed up in the phone book,” said Caleb, turning to head down the hill.

  Simon stood and hooked his arm under Mark’s elbow. “Or we could go to Mark’s and see if Mrs. Forrester has any pictures of her friends.”

  Abbey shook her head. “I don’t think we should go to the Forresters’, or home. Not until Mom and Dad get home. Mantis could be down there. We should head out on the other path, go to the school, and check out the phone books there; we wanted to check out the Greenhill crowd anyway.”

  The four of them trooped down the hill, taking the path that led to the cul-de-sac adjacent to theirs. The warmth of the mid-afternoon sun grazed their faces as they exited the woods. The wind had picked up, sending the rain clouds from earlier in the day into a huddled black mass over Circle Plateau. Mark made no move to leave them, and apart from the occasional moan and hand clenching, lapsed into silence as he loped next to Simon. Simon, who struggled to make conversation at the best of times, had plastered a benign look on his face and every so often smiled and nodded at Mark as they trudged along. Abbey had to suppress a giggle at the pairing, despite the circumstances.

  “What was up with you when we were talking to Sandy? You seemed totally strung out,” Abbey said to Caleb as they marched toward the school.

  “I’ve seen her somewhere before. I was trying to figure out where.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Caleb’s jaw jutted out with a stubborn tilt. “I dunno. I just know I’ve seen her before.”

  “She probably just looks like someone you know. Weren’t you scared with Mantis?”

  “No. He didn’t seem like he wanted to hurt me at all. He was really friendly.”

  Abbey sniffed. “I don’t like the idea of a friendly insect, especially a predatory one. And don’t forget, we think he drugged Mrs. Forrester.”

  They could hear the cheering from the stadium as they approached the school. Two yellow Greenhill buses perched in the parking lot, their long rear ends hanging precariously past their back wheels. The game had clearly started.

  “Where do you suppose we could find a phone book in this place?” Simon asked, pulling open the side door to the school. “Does anybody even use phone books anymore?”

  “That’s easy,” said Caleb brightly. “The office.”

  “But…” Abbey started. Caleb had already run ahead to the office window and was making his request to the receptionist, Ms. Gallagher.

  Ms. Gallagher, normally a friendly sort—at least where they were concerned—looked Caleb up and down over her burgundy glasses, then glanced over his shoulder at Abbey and Simon, and lingeringly at Mark. “Yes, I have a phone book, but weren’t the three of you away today?”

  Caleb didn’t drop his beseeching smile. “Yes, we were. We were at the hospital. Our aunt had a stroke last night. We’re trying to track down a friend of hers. She needs to talk to him.”

  One eyebrow shot up over the rim of the burgundy glasses. “Where are your parents?”

  Caleb continued to smile. “They’re
with our aunt having some tests run. We’re trying to find her old love. They broke up over a misunderstanding. They haven’t spoken in years. He needs to be with her now. Can you help us? Please?”

  Ms. Gallagher stared at them. Abbey felt certain they looked like a motley bunch. Caleb wore his most charming smile, but Mark had a veneer of sweat on his forehead and Simon hadn’t even bothered to remove the hood of his sweatshirt or his vaguely hostile look. Ms. Gallagher glanced at the cover of the open romance book face down on the corner of her desk.

  She rose from her desk. “Here’s the phone book. Don’t remove it from the desk.”

  “Absolutely. Anything you say, Ms. G.” Caleb flashed his broadest grin and flipped the phone book open to the B’s. Abbey leaned in over his shoulder as he ran his finger down the column. She could feel Simon’s breath on her neck. Abbey read the words as his forefinger passed over them: Bedard, Beddoe, Beddow, Bedwell, Bedworth. None of them seemed to fit.

  “What about the yellow pages?” suggested Simon. “Check under Physicians.”

  Caleb flipped to the yellow pages and found Physicians. But there were no names that had ‘bed’ or ‘truck’ in them. Then they checked optometrists, dentists, and veterinarians with no luck.

  “What about the college?” said Abbey.

  “We’ll have to go to the computer lab for that,” Simon said.

  They smiled at Ms. Gallagher, who eyed them suspiciously, and then they retreated to the lab to huddle around a single screen.

  Mark slumped into a chair and clutched the armrests.

  Caleb typed in ‘Coventry Community College’ and then entered ‘Staff Directory’ into the search window.

  “Enter name of the person you are searching for,” Caleb read aloud.

  He typed ‘Bed’ and hit return.