He swung himself from the trellis onto the balcony. The sliding door was unlocked. He stepped into a well-appointed office, right behind an oak desk as big as his bed in prison. Before he could get any farther, he felt something sting him in the chest. “What the—?” he managed to get out before his entire body began to tremble from the electric current that ran through it.
Tim had never been tasered before, but he’d seen it happen to others. Like them, there was nothing he could do but collapse to the floor and twitch as thousands of volts ran through his body. As he lay on the floor, he saw a flash of turquoise. Renee Kim squatted beside him, the taser in her hand. With a smile she said, “What do we have here?”
Tim could do nothing but mentally kick himself for being bested by a tween. He supposed it wouldn’t be long until he went to prison in two universes.
Chapter 6
Renee Kim knew all about pedophiles. They’d had an entire assembly about the subject at school last year. A psychologist from the school district had talked about inappropriate touching, which was greeted with snickers and sarcastic comments. The shrink had gone on to talk about how you had to be careful when online to avoid dangerous situations.
Despite this warning, Renee had engineered a few dangerous situations. She’d gone into chat rooms and let creepy guys chat her up. Though they might say they were still in high school, she could tell they were much older from the way they tried much too hard to sound hip. She would usually go along with it; she even set up meetings with them.
The joke was always on them, as Renee never actually went to any of these meetings. She never gave away her real identity when online. She had created a whole other identity for herself called Akako Chiu. Anyone with half a brain could probably figure out that “Akako Chiu” was too close to the sound made when sneezing to be a real name. Not that these creeps ever seemed to care about that. They were only driven by their dicks.
The life of Akako Chiu had begun in a chat room, but it didn’t take long until it expanded. Renee had created a Facebook page for her creation; she used a picture of some cute Asian teenager clipped out of a Gap catalog. Inspired by that catalog, Renee had decided to make Akako Chiu as unlike her as possible. Akako Chiu had a blog and Twitter account where she talked incessantly about shopping at the mall or watching whatever MTV reality show was popular at the time. Sadly—at least in Renee’s mind—Akako Chiu had thousands of followers and “friends,” many of whom contacted her to espouse their own bland nonsense.
Aggie looked down on these shenanigans. “What if someone finds out who you really are?” she asked.
“No one’s going to find out,” Renee said. Over the last two years Aggie had become so lame. She no longer dyed her hair, dressed in black, or wrote bad poetry. The latter was good, as Renee had gotten tired of listening to Aggie’s poems about the dark abyss. Still, the dark, brooding Aggie had been a lot more fun than this sunny, mousy one with her bland brown hair and sensible clothes. She had become like a fatter version of her goody-goody sister Sophie.
For that matter, all of the former Goth kids at school had gone straight. Most of them became like Glenda; they wore hippie dresses with beads in their long, undyed hair and blathered about peace and love. They stopped smoking and became vegetarians, though the most hard-core like Glenda became vegans. When they gathered behind the school, they sat in a circle to hold hands and spout all this feminist, girl power bullshit about sisterhood.
Renee was the only Goth kid left, which actually made her feel better. Whereas before she had been trying to fit in with a clique—admittedly the most unpopular clique at school—now she set her own style, stood out instead of conforming, which was supposed to be the whole point of Goth in the first place. Though for her it wasn’t so much about not conforming with the kids at school as not to conform with Daddy’s rules. He would love it if she started to wear hippie dresses and let her hair go au natural. Since Aggie had gone bland, he’d started to let her come over to the house and even let her sleep over.
It was during one sleepover, after Daddy had gone to sleep, that Renee had begun the life of Akako Chiu and Aggie had reiterated what the lame-o at the assembly had said. As it turned out, Aggie had been right to be cautious. Someone had figured out who she was and followed her home. Either that or he was just a random stalker who’d seen her at the library.
She had seen him at the library; his eyes peered over the wall of his cubicle at her like one of those whack-a-moles. She had pretended not to see him as she got her books from Miss Beech and then checked out. She’d pretended not to notice as he stumbled onto the bus after her and then stared at her the entire time she talked to Miss Earl. He had tried to appear discreet as he followed her from the bus stop, but she’d known he was there the entire time. In theory Floyd should have stopped him at the gatehouse, but Floyd was obviously not the brightest bulb in the box—why else would he be sixty and working as a security guard for the last ten years?
The house had a security system, but as she walked home, Renee decided not to use it. She didn’t want to scare this creep off; she wanted to make sure he got what he deserved. So instead of activating the security system, she’d gone up to Daddy’s bedroom to take the taser out of his nightstand drawer. She wasn’t supposed to know about that or how to use it, but of course she did.
The creep was about as subtle to get into the house as he’d been when he’d followed her home. She knew he would break into Daddy’s office; she heard him climb up the trellis. She had unlocked the door so he could find his way in. Then she squatted behind the desk to wait. The desk was big enough and she was little enough that it was easy for her to hide there until he stumbled in.
He only needed one shock to go down, which disappointed her. She had hoped he might put up more of a fight just so she could watch him squirm a little more. He flopped around like a fish on the floor for about a minute and then he went perfectly still. She prodded him with the toe of her boot to make sure he was still alive. Part of her was disappointed that he was.
Daddy didn’t have tools—he had people to fix anything that broke—but Renee did find some twine in the kitchen that Consuela used to tie up bundles of newspaper to be recycled. She used this twine to tie the pervert’s wrists and hands good and tight as she’d learned to do her one summer at Girl Scout camp; she’d never thought any of that boring shit her counselors droned on about would actually come in handy.
The smart thing to do would be to call the cops. She had him dead to rights in the house; there wasn’t any way he could weasel out of it. There was a good reason not to: Daddy would never leave her alone then. If he found out about this creep, he’d probably hire a bodyguard to follow her everywhere she went.
So she decided to handle this herself. She dragged him down the hall into one of the guest bedrooms. This didn’t prove too difficult, as she’d developed pretty good strength from carrying around so many books. Still, she was a bit winded by the time she got him into the room. She decided to go downstairs to the kitchen for a soda. She got one for the pervert too; his throat might be dry whenever he woke up.
He still wasn’t awake when she returned. She stared at him for a few minutes and decided that for a pervert he was pretty hot. Most of the pedophiles she saw on TV were old, fat, bald, or some combination of the three. This guy with his dark brown skin that bulged with muscle looked more like an athlete or movie star. That was except for his dirty, smelly work shirt, pants, and jacket. The jacket had the logo for someplace called Speedy Oil on it with the name ‘Tim’ stitched on the left breast.
Was Tim the creep’s name? Renee patted his pockets, but he didn’t have a wallet. This didn’t come as a surprise given that he didn’t have any money for bus fare. In his jacket pocket she found a paper scroll. She tried to unravel the scroll, but it remained sealed tight. At either end of the scroll she could see a faint purple glow—some kind of seal? She would have to look at it more later.
She opened her cell phone
and took a few pictures of the creep to use as evidence later on. She held her arm out as far as possible to get one shot of her beside the pervert, as if they slept together, though fully clothed. It might be fun to undress him, to see what he looked like down there.
The creep chose that moment to open his eyes. “Where am I?” he asked.
“In a bedroom. Not mine. I’m sure you’d have liked that.”
“Why?”
“Aren’t you trying to get into my pants?”
She was a little disappointed when his eyes widened in surprise at this. “Get in your pants? You’re just a little girl.”
“I am not a little girl,” she said with a huff. Her first period had come three months ago, though she had yet to tell Daddy about it; he would freak when he found out. She was supposed to be his little girl forever, despite that she’d been reading at an adult level for ten years now.
“Sorry,” the creep said.
“So if you’re not here to ravish me then what do you want?”
“Akako sent me to get your help.”
Renee snorted at this. “Now I know you’re lying. I made Akako up. There’s no way you could have talked to her about me because I am her.”
“I don’t understand.”
She rolled her eyes and then brought up the Facebook page on her phone. She held it up for him to see. “See that? It’s all bullshit. So you better come up with a more convincing story before the cops get here.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know who that is. I’m talking about Akako. Agnes Chiostro’s wife. She’s the one who sent me here. She said you’d help.”
The phone slipped out of Renee’s fingers. She shook her head, her voice hoarse as she said, “You can’t be talking about that Akako. She’s gone. She disappeared.”
“I know. She sent me here from her world.”
Renee backed away from the pervert and pressed her back against the door. She knew all too well about the Akako he meant. They had shared Renee’s body for about a week. That was an experience Renee still sometimes had nightmares about; she dreamed she looked into a mirror but saw a grown woman who looked very similar to her mother. That Akako had been flushed from Renee’s body through some kind of magic used by Aggie—only not the Aggie who was friends with Renee, an older one who was a witch.
While both Akako and Aggie had turned out to be very nice, to think about the experience still gave her the willies. Especially because she was the only one who seemed to remember it; Aggie didn’t have any memory of that week. Her friends—the former Goth kids—had repressed it as well. Even if they couldn’t remember, Renee knew the events of that week had left Aggie and the others changed, to turn them into hippies.
Renee snatched the taser from beside her. “You’re lying!” she shouted. “Akako was my friend. She wouldn’t send some creep to stalk me.”
“I wasn’t trying to stalk you. I was trying to find you so I could talk to you.”
She tightened her grip on the taser with one hand and brushed tears from her eyes with the other. “Fine, so talk. And you’d better make it good.”
“OK,” he said. “But it’s not really going to make any sense.”
***
As he said, his story didn’t make any sense. Or at least it wouldn’t to someone who hadn’t seen what Renee had the last time people from a parallel world showed up here. Even to her a lot of it sounded better suited to the kind of silly books Aggie liked to read.
The only part that did make sense was when the creep said his name was Tim Cooper. That at least matched the name on his jacket. That and he said he worked as a grease monkey at a place called Speedy Oil in some nowhere town called Corwin City. Of course he could have stolen the clothes from someone else and made that part up.
The rest sounded like pure bullshit. She knew all about quantum mechanics; she had read Einstein when she was four and Hawking when she was five. The idea of parallel worlds was plausible enough and she had first-hand proof that such a world existed when Akako had possessed her body for that week two years ago. In Tim’s world, most everything was the same, except England, France, and Spain had colonized most of North America instead of the Scandinavian countries.
The people she knew were all different in his world. Everything was kind of topsy-turvy there in that Miss Earl and Miss Beech were young women while Aggie was over five hundred years old. When Tim described Miss Earl, Renee began to shiver again. According to him, she was Dr. Earl there, a geologist who worked at the Plaine Museum, which in her world was known as the Lundmark Museum of Natural History. What gave Renee the shakes was when Tim said this Dr. Earl was a genius who had earned her PhD by the time she was nineteen. She didn’t need to be a genius to draw the obvious parallel: Dr. Earl was her.
Except Dr. Earl lived a much cooler life than Renee. She lived the kind of life Renee could only dream about. Not only was she a doctor and the director of a museum before she was thirty, but she was a superhero too! She didn’t have tights but apparently she did have a cape that allowed her to turn invisible. From what Tim said, Dr. Earl wore some kind of magic armor that protected her from harm and gave her super strength.
Renee scoffed when Tim mentioned Dr. Earl’s nemesis was something called the Black Dragoon. “That sounds like some kind of Scottish-themed bar,” Renee said. “I mean, does he wear a kilt and play bagpipes that turn people into zombies or something?”
“No. He wears black armor and he has a bunch of sharp claws for ripping people apart.”
“Wow, claws. How original. Does he use them on you in your dreams or is he just a loner who doesn’t remember who he is?”
“He’s an evil creature who harvests hearts for a goddess named Isis. At least that’s where he came from I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I haven’t actually seen him. The last time it was Becky wearing the armor and she killed a couple dozen people.”
“Becky? You mean Miss Beech?”
“Yes. I already told you she’s not an old lady where I come from. She’s about my age. She works as chief of staff for the city council president.”
“She works in politics?” Renee snickered at the thought of this; Miss Beech wouldn’t even let her check out Huckleberry Finn because she thought a book with the “N-word” in it was too controversial for a little girl to read. “I can’t see that.”
Tim sighed and then nodded towards the unopened can of Mountain Dew next to her. “You mind if I have a sip? I’m getting bone dry here.”
“Fine.” Renee opened the can and then inserted a straw; she guided it to Tim’s mouth so he could take a pull from it. “Better?”
“A little. Where was I?”
“You were talking about the Black Dragoon.”
“Right. He works for this Egyptian goddess named Isis. She’s the real reason I’m here.”
The rest of Tim’s story sounded like something from a bizarre soap opera. Dr. Earl had given birth to a baby girl, except some Russian guy had switched the baby for another one. This baby died and Dr. Earl’s hair turned white from grief. In the meantime the Russian guy raised the baby as his daughter, until Dr. Earl found out and went to rescue the kid in Russia.
All of this turned out to be a trap. Isis had a group of assassins kidnap the baby—who was two years old now—and give her to Isis. In exchange, Isis helped the assassins kidnap another baby. “Akako and Aggie’s daughter Renee,” Tim said.
“No. Way,” Renee said. “They named their baby for me?”
“I guess so.”
“Wow.” Renee wiped at her eyes again. She hadn’t realized their brief meeting in this world had meant so much to Akako and Aggie. “That is so cool.”
She had to leave the room for a minute to get a tissue from the bathroom. As she did, she heard the front door open. “Renee? You home? Why you not turn on lights?” her father said.
Renee hurried over to the stairs and waved. “I’m up here, Daddy. I was just reading. I guess I forgot ab
out the lights.”
“You eat dinner yet?”
“Oh, yeah, I just warmed something up.”
“You eat healthy or you end up like Agnes. Fat.” Despite that Daddy had warmed to Aggie, he still held some of his old prejudice against her. To Daddy, obesity was a sign of laziness and slovenliness, two things he hated with a passion.
“I am not fat,” she said and stamped her foot. She stormed away and slammed the door to her bedroom. Then she slipped back down the hallway to the guest room. That little tantrum ought to buy her a couple of hours before Daddy finally decided to risk further ire by checking up on her.
She found Tim still on the floor, though he’d managed to roll over to the can of Mountain Dew and get the straw into his mouth. She snatched it away from him. “My, aren’t we resourceful,” she said.
“Just thirsty.”
“You’re not getting any more until you finish telling me why you’re here.”
“Fine.” She rolled Tim back over to the bed and helped him sit up. “Emma found Isis with her daughter. Isis had put a spell on the kid so she was completely under Isis’s control. The only way to break it was for Emma to trade places with her daughter. But when she did, Isis took Emma’s adult body, which allowed her to reclaim her full power. She made Rampart City—along with Emma and Agnes and everyone else—disappear into this weird black fog.”
“So how does Akako fit into this? Or me for that matter?”
“Akako is actually from another parallel world. Not yours or mine. There are a whole bunch of them. There’s this little girl named Joanna who has the power to talk to all of these universes. She talked to me and told me to go to Rampart City. Then she brought Akako in to help me. Akako gave me the scroll, which opens a gateway to this world, and she told me to find you.”
“Why? What can I possibly do? I’m eleven.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 146
