by Max Barry
Clay let the curtain fall closed. She tucked her hand into the small of her back before he could see. No one reaching for the door handle here. No, sir. No one who needed to be chased.
“I think we have a few minutes,” Clay said. “I can tell you what’s going on. But it won’t be easy for you to hear. I need us to give each other a chance. All right?”
She nodded.
“Can you give me that chance?”
“Yes,” she said, although she didn’t like that: the push for affirmation.
“Like you said, your office knows who I am. They have my name, my photo.” He held up his hands. “I’ve left fingerprints everywhere. Right?”
She nodded. Yes! These were excellent points. They could all agree that it would be crazy for Clay to do anything. There were security measures. Yes.
“So you can relax.”
“Okay,” she said. She was not relaxed. This situation had a long way to go before she would be anywhere near relaxed. But she was being agreeable.
He rubbed his hands together, a nervous gesture. He was still near the curtains. It was not completely impossible that she could get out the door before he reached her. “I’m just going to tell you. Madison, I’m not from this world.”
Oh, God, she thought.
He came toward her. At first she thought he meant to take her hands, and that jolted her to her senses, because for a moment there she’d been snagged on the preposterousness of what he’d said: I’m not from this world—like, what did that mean, exactly, in what sense? But now she realized: the crazy sense.
The photo at the office didn’t matter. The fingerprints didn’t matter. He believed he was from another world.
“I’ve traveled here for you. Only for you, Madison.” He hesitated. “How do you feel about that?”
She felt like vomiting from terror. But she said, “I’m . . . confused.” Her tone was level, almost curious, and that was good; that was exactly what she wanted.
He glanced at the curtain again. When he next moved to the window, she was gone. She should have run the first time. “Of course you are. And scared, I bet. But you can trust me.”
His face was hangdog, and here it was again, this weird insistence on her approval, even though he had all the power. It might be something she could use. For whatever reason, he cared what she thought, and if she were smart—if she didn’t push too hard—she might be able to find a way to turn that against him. I need us to give each other a chance, he’d said. Maybe she could make him give her a chance.
“I . . . do feel like I can trust you,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
His reaction was bigger than she’d expected: His loud eyebrows shot up and his mouth dropped open. “Really?”
“Yes,” she said, rowing hard. “I felt that when we met. Maybe you remind me of someone I know?” No reaction. That was a swing and a miss. But he was waiting, his expression expectant, offering her another pitch. “Or . . . maybe we’ve met before.”
Whack. A solid hit. His face lit up. “When do you think we’ve met?”
Oh, Christ. “I don’t know. There’s just . . . something.”
“When?” he said again.
“College? High school?” But these were bad guesses, she saw. Not even close. She did something very brave and took a step toward him, i.e., away from the door. A small deposit toward the hope of a future return. “Or something deeper. More spiritual.”
He exhaled shakily. “You’re right. We have met before. But not in this world.”
She nodded. Yes, of course, that’s probably it.
“All this . . .” He gestured to . . . the room, the curtains? No, no: the world, of course. “It’s a drop in the ocean. There are more worlds. More than you can count. They look the same but they’re not, not if you pay attention. And you’re in all of them. Everywhere I go, you’re doing different things. Every time I leave, it’s to find you again.”
He gazed at her. She felt required to ask a question. He’d just told her there were a bunch of worlds; of course, of course, she would have questions, if she took that seriously, and was not devoting most of her brain toward figuring out the location of the door handle. She said: “Why?” He didn’t answer, and she thought maybe that had been a bad question, but no, it wasn’t that: He just wanted her to figure out the answer. “In these . . . other worlds . . . are we . . . together?”
He gave a rueful smile and shook his head. But that was the right answer, she thought. That was what he’d wanted her to say. “Sometimes I can’t even get to see you. Sometimes I can get to you but it doesn’t work out. There are people trying to keep us apart. People who move, like me.” He glanced at the curtains again. “They’re getting close.”
She was interested in that: in people who wanted to keep them apart. She would like to meet them now, if that was at all practical. “Why do they want to keep us apart?”
“It’s complicated. I’ll explain on the way.”
On the way. For a long moment she tried and failed to imagine what on earth that could mean. Then it hit her: His box was a portal. Inside would be a car battery or a dead opossum that he’d convinced himself was a transdimensional travel device, and he would hold her hands and ask her to close her eyes. Then: Kazam! They would be in another world. Which would look the same, according to him. So, very conveniently, there would be no evidence of whether they’d traveled. But all this was fine, Maddie realized, completely fine, because after that, he would want to leave the house, and then she could run.
“On the way to where?” she said, widening her eyes, like: Interdimensional travel, how amazing.
“I have a hotel room,” he said.
Ah.
They said never let yourself be taken to a secondary location. That was where you got murdered. But she had to get out of this house. She would go with him, but not get in his car. “All right,” she said.
He smiled. “I still can’t believe you recognized me. That never happens.”
She smiled back.
“I mean, never,” he said.
She felt a touch of ice in her throat. Her smile felt welded to her face.
“You know, I love you, Madison. In every world. Even when you don’t love me back.”
“We should go,” she said, “before those people arrive.”
“Can I ask you something?”
She nodded mutely.
“Can I hug you?”
She said nothing.
“It’s just, it’s been so long. It kills me to get this close to you and not touch you.” He spread his arms.
She revolted at the idea. She could shove him, she thought. He was standing in front of the silver box; she could move in for the hug, then push him over the box.
She moved toward him. She didn’t know if she could really shove him. It was fine in theory, but dudes were always a little faster and stronger than you expected. It was easy to forget, but occasionally there was a situation, a game of mixed basketball, a guy getting out of hand at a party, which made you realize: Oh, shit, they are quick.
He spread his arms. His disfigured forearm caught the shaft of light and she saw it clearly: a mess of older scar tissue and newer bruising, a red scab that couldn’t be more than a week old. None of it looked like it was made by a dog.
She stopped, unable to make herself approach any closer. He stepped forward and gently put his arms around her. She let it happen. He exhaled noisily. His cheek rested on her head. “This is nice,” he said.
She could see over the lid of the case. She had been right earlier: It was a toolbox. It had levels. On each was a different kind of knife. It was a box of gleaming metal and pain. She saw a space, as if something belonged there but was missing.
She began to tremble. “Shh,” Clay said. “Shh.” But she couldn’t stop. His hands moved to her shoulders and
pushed her back until he was holding her at arm’s length. She couldn’t help throwing fear-stricken glances at the box, and a smile crept along his lips. “Oh, Madison. You don’t need to worry about that. That’s only for if it doesn’t work out. This time is different. Because this time you know me, don’t you?”
She nodded.
“You felt a connection, right? As soon as we met?”
“Yes.”
“Or,” he said, “you were messing with me. Stringing me along.” His fingers tightened on her shoulders. “Is that what you were doing?”
“No.”
He gave a short, dismissive exhalation. “You know what I find crazy? There are so many of you. You’re as common as dirt. I can find another tomorrow. But you always think you’re so special. You’re a real estate agent, for God’s sake. But I gave you a chance, like I always do. I was honest with you and you lied to me.”
She seized on this. “You said you didn’t want to hurt me. You promised.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. But this . . .” His eyes ran down her body. “This isn’t you. I can’t stand to see you like this. I honestly can’t.”
She couldn’t stop thinking about the space in the box. There was a missing tool and he had it somewhere.
She fled. Tried to. He had her before she’d so much as twitched, and she opened her mouth to scream and he jammed his forearm into it. Then his bulk followed, forcing her to the floor, knocking the breath out of her. She couldn’t breathe, choked by his forearm, by the horrible puckered wound. When she tried to bite him, her teeth perfectly filled the indentations of his scar tissue.
He was reaching behind for whatever he had in his back pocket. “I hate that you make me do this,” he said, and even as she struggled, she could see that he did indeed look regretful, like a man forced to put down a pet dog, one he’d loved that had turned rabid. The knife loomed, fat and wide and evil. “I really hate it.”
2
There was a clock. Each second, it jerked forward with a decisive, mechanical thwack. In Felicity’s first month in the newsroom, she’d asked if maybe that clock could be moved, or replaced with something digital, or anything, really, that didn’t emit a sound like nails being driven into a board sixty times a minute above her head. The answer was no, because the clock was an institution. It was an old-timey wooden box suspended from the ceiling and had been here longer than she had. In these challenging times (for newspapers), it was a comforting connection to the past, when they had been respected, and the Daily News’s editions always landed with an impact. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Like that.
On the phone, Felicity Staples was listening to a district attorney tell her she was making a mistake. He was hard to hear, because of the clock. “What you’re insinuating simply isn’t correct,” said the D.A. He was the county D.A.; his name was Tom Daniels. He and Felicity had spoken several times before, and each time, his opinion of her seemed to drop a little more.
“I’m not insinuating anything,” she said. “I’m only asking questions.”
“Please.” She’d seen him do this on TV, when pressed on something he didn’t want to answer: Please, then a subtle change of subject. A pinch of the brow, expressing both amusement and pain at the question. Daniels was mid-forties, somewhat dubiously tanned, with a magnificently expressive face. “How long have you spent on this story? I have trouble believing that Brandon considers this a sensible use of your time.”
Brandon Aberman was the paper’s managing editor. She ignored the jibe, because, one, it was a diversion, and, two, yes, Brandon would definitely prefer her to work on something else, preferably involving bedbugs.
“A young man from a well-connected family walks away with no time served despite a plethora of evidence—”
“Plethora,” said Daniels. “I’m so glad you’ve found an outlet for the English degree. If you were more familiar with the reality of prosecution, you’d understand we have to make the best deal we can, given the circumstances.”
“Circumstances like the family mixes socially with the mayor?”
“Felicity Staples,” he said, like a disappointed parent. Felicity Staples, come here. Did you make this mess? “I’m quite sure there’s a better outlet for your talents than fishing for gotcha quotes from a D.A.”
The newsroom was a huge open space with dark desks jumbled about beneath silent, hyperactive TV screens. Felicity’s desk was near the front, close to the elevators, beneath the clock. Blind-shuttered glass offices lay to her left and right, while ahead, beyond a barren patch of deskscape that had lain bare for six months, were two glorious windows, offering skyscraper-framed glimpses of sky. In between was a message board, where stood Melinda Gaines, a political reporter and columnist, with a coffee cup. Melinda raised the cup and took a careful sip. On the message board, Felicity knew, was an internal job posting for “social media manager.” She knew that because she’d studied it herself a few times already. Each time, she’d decided the position was irrelevant to everything she’d ever studied for, worked toward, and believed in, as well as offering less money. But it was also a job that would definitely exist in twelve months, which couldn’t be said for her own. Watching Melinda Gaines contemplate it over coffee was terrifying, because Melinda Gaines was forty-four and had written a towering series of articles exposing three corrupt city judges. If Gaines was considering “social media manager,” the writing really was on the wall for the future of journalism. Literally posted there.
“I’m comfortable with how I’m employing my talents, thank you, Tom,” Felicity said, because she didn’t want to verbally spar with Tom Daniels. She wanted to make him feel comfortable and eviscerate him in print. She was thirty-three. She could do plenty of things with her life. “Is it true that you met with the Hammonds personally the night before you dropped the charges?”
“I’d have to check my diary.”
Her view of Melinda Gaines contemplating the future of journalism was broken by the gangling form of Todd the intern, flapping a piece of yellow notepaper. He wore round glasses and an anxious expression. “I’ve got a murder.”
Felicity shooed him. She did not do murders. She did city politics, lifestyle, occasionally stories on people who died eating something they shouldn’t have, but not murders. “You’ve met them, though, at some point? Socially?”
“I can find out and send you that information, if you like.”
He would not. He’d taken her call, to rob her of the line District Attorney Tom Daniels did not respond to requests for comment by the time this article was published; now he would string her along until the next revolution of the news cycle, when nobody remembered the curiously lenient plea deal of James Hammond, a fine-looking college boy whose promising future was briefly threatened by an assault upon a girl who laughed at him at a party.
“Can you take a murder?” said Todd, moving into her eyeline.
She swiveled. “Is it standard procedure for a district attorney to involve himself in cases when he has a social relationship with the accused’s family?” Daniels admitted it was not standard procedure for a district attorney to—
“It’s standard procedure for the D.A. to prosecute all cases to the best of his ability. Is there anything else?”
“How would you describe your relationship with the Hammonds?”
District Attorney Tom Daniels admitted he had a “long-standing” relationship with the Hammond family—
Alternately:
District Attorney Tom Daniels claimed a “limited” relationship with the Hammonds, but has dined at their Hampton Bays mansion on at least two occasions—
“Someone needs to take this,” said Todd, sounding anxious. “Levi’s out.”
She glared at him. Todd put on a wounded look and walked away.
“I’ve run into the Hammonds on several occasions,” said Daniels. “They’re active in society; if
you get out enough, you’re bound to meet them.”
She probably should have known better than to try to verbally entrap an attorney. She plucked a yellow pen with a Goofy head from her basket and rolled it between her finger and thumb. Three years ago, she’d run from work to meet a guy for a blind date, scribbling notes for an article on the subway, and as she entered the restaurant, she checked herself carefully in a mirror, making sure her dirty-blond hair and face were in the right places, then, without thinking, tucked that Goofy pen behind her ear. It was whole minutes later, after they’d exchanged polite kisses and introductions, just as she was starting to think, This one seems all right, did the realization steal over her: DID I PUT THAT FUCKING PEN IN MY EAR??? She reached up and felt it. She was mortified because it looked like she was putting on a kooky affectation, and she could not apologize enough, but the guy didn’t seem to mind one way or the other, and from there the night actually went well. They were now living together, and she kept the Goofy pen as a reminder that things could work out no matter how much she tried to sabotage them.
She said, “What did you think of the victim impact statement?”
A moment of silence for her weird question. It was so easily deflected—What I think isn’t relevant—that he didn’t try. “I thought it was profoundly sad.”
“I thought it was horrifying,” Felicity said. “She said she doesn’t laugh anymore. She laughed at a boy at a party, and he hit her so hard that her retina detached, and now she doesn’t laugh. I can’t stop thinking about that.”
Daniels was silent.
“I guess that’s not so shocking to you,” she said. “You deal with worse all the time.”
“The victim’s injuries were very serious and saddening,” Daniels said, and they were back to the game.
