by B. V. Larson
“About time you called me. You’ve got a new phone, don’t you?”
I admitted that I had made a switch. I did so periodically, in order to keep the bill collectors’ databases guessing.
“So, what’s up?” he asked. “Are you in a murdering mood again tonight?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That dead guy in the Triangle. You shot him, didn’t you?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure. Sure, you don’t. Same old Draith. I knew as soon as the report came back from forensics it was you. Who else carries around a rare .32 pistol like he’s some kind of secret agent, and likes to pop holes in fat accountants with it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. But out of curiosity—did the accountant live?”
“Barely. Why did he come after you?”
“Because Meng doesn’t like me.”
McKesson laughed, then told me he’d already figured out Meng was involved. “Give me something else,” he said. “Something I don’t know.”
“All right, I think she’s trying to kill Gilling, too. And she’s pulling things into town from other worlds to do it. She might even be behind the monster that’s eating people in the Triangle. I haven’t figured that one out yet, but she’s my top suspect.”
“Why have you been hanging around the Triangle so much lately?” McKesson asked. “Thinking about moving into the neighborhood?”
I glanced over at Jacqueline. She was the reason, of course. First, I’d been looking for her. After that, I’d been dragged there to look at her shoe collection. I certainly didn’t want to admit to that, however. It was embarrassing.
“Hardly,” I said. “But I have made some new acquaintances there.”
“She’s with you, isn’t she? The girl with the shoes?”
“Forget about her. Let’s talk about Meng.”
“I’m on my way.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How would you know where I am?”
McKesson chuckled. “You’ve been on long enough. The cell towers and a gizmo in my car have you pinpointed in Henderson. You’re at home, and I’ve got your number now.”
I hung up and cursed. “He’s coming. That’s exactly why I don’t like calling on him. You can’t control a conversation with McKesson. He’ll take it his way every time.”
“Should we run?” she asked.
I shook my head slowly. “I’ll answer the door when he shows up. You vanish, and hang around. He doesn’t know about your little trick yet.”
“Don’t tell him, okay?” she asked. “He makes me nervous.”
“You’re probably right to feel that way,” I admitted. “He can probably find you again—if anyone could.”
The doorbell chimed precisely twelve minutes later. It was just after midnight when McKesson crossed the threshold into my house.
“Nice night, Detective.”
“Yeah. Not like a few days ago; that was a boiler.”
I nodded.
McKesson stalked into the house, his head swiveling this way and that. He was taking in everything, I could tell. He spotted a long-tailed cat sauntering out of the kitchen to see who had arrived.
“So,” he said, “now you fancy cats, do you?”
“Love them.”
“Yeah, right. Tell her to come out. I don’t want to have to search; it’s a big place.”
I knew Jacqueline was standing in the entryway that led to the kitchen. At least, that was the last place I’d seen her before she’d vanished. I knew she liked staying on the tiles because they didn’t give her away. Her feet made impressions in carpet, which defeated the purpose of being invisible.
I shrugged. “Start searching. We are all alone here. Unless Meng’s next assassin is hiding in the shadows.”
Looking annoyed, he made no effort to search. He took a spot on a folding chair across from my couch and asked for coffee. I brought a pot and mugs from the kitchen, placing them on the coffee table. We both helped ourselves. As we talked quietly, he kept eyeing the walls and hallways that led to the other parts of the house. I knew he suspected Jacqueline was listening. He had uncanny instincts when it came to things like that.
We talked about Gilling and Rostok. I told him Rostok had asked me to find Ezzie. At that point, he frowned at me. “I thought you said Rostok wanted you to find out about the girl and odd events in the Triangle.”
“Well, they could be related.”
He stared at me, frowning. He shook his head suddenly. “Did you bullshit me? Yeah, you did. You worked me, gaining my help under false pretenses. Rostok didn’t ask you to find the girl.”
I waved away his words. “Let’s talk about the situation as it stands today. Rostok gave me your name, saying you could help me get to a hot place where Ezzie might have gone.”
“Sure, I’ll happily send you to hell.”
McKesson chuckled, and I waited until he was done.
“There are only two hot worlds I know of personally,” he said. “I’m sure there are, like, a billion more, but I haven’t seen any of them.”
“You mean Ezzie’s home, the lava world? Is the other one the bright, sunlit place you told me about?”
McKesson nodded slowly.
“I call the bright one beach world,” he said. “It’s like a giant beach—but there’s no water.” I could tell by his faraway look he was remembering the bright white world. When we’d first met, he’d told me about that place and his unhappy adventures there. He suffered radiation burns.
“I need to go to both worlds,” I said. “I need to check them out and look for Ezzie and Gilling. How do I get there?”
“Gilling is the easiest ticket to anywhere you want to go. But since he’s gone, we’ll have to flip a coin.”
“Meaning?”
McKesson produced a silver coin. It was an old quarter. He flipped it into the air and let it land, ringing and clattering, on the coffee table between us. It landed heads up, and I stared at the unfamiliar face.
“Is that George Washington?”
“You got it in one. That’s an old piece; check the date on it.”
I picked it up and read the date, 1954. I handled it gingerly, as I was sure I was holding an object now. I was a trifle worried that McKesson was willing to let me touch it at all. Usually people were paranoid about objects in their possession. Apparently, McKesson wasn’t worried about me stealing his quarter.
The moment I touched it, I felt it was cold. Very cold. I found this odd, as he’d just taken it out of his pocket. McKesson leaned forward, clasping his hands and watching me closely.
“Feels funny, doesn’t it? I figure it must have been the dead of winter when that thing was empowered. Isn’t it odd that something that stays cold forever would take you to the kinds of places it does? Maybe whatever god made it finds irony amusing.”
I glanced at him, then flicked my eyes back to the coin. “It takes you to another place? How does it work?”
McKesson leaned back in his chair. “You’ve still got guts. Most would be too scared to spit while holding that thing.”
“Just tell me.”
“First, you have to flip it. You have to keep flipping it until it lands on its edge. Then, you just give it a spin. It will form kind of a sphere if you get it spinning fast enough.”
“And?”
“Why don’t you give it a try?”
I shook my head. I already half expected that this thing was going to summon the monster from the Triangle to devour me. “Just tell me before it screws me somehow.”
McKesson looked disappointed. “It makes a rip, you’ll see. The rips usually look like burning circles in the air. You spin it one way to go to one world and the other way to go to the other.”
“The other? I don’t understand.”
“It can open rips to two different worlds.”
I thought about that, and nodded. He’d told me long ago that he’d first gone t
o a world of brilliant white light. He’d also used this coin, as I recalled, to get both of us out of the lava world.
“Which way do you spin it to go to the lava world?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I don’t remember.”
“Liar.”
“What difference does it make? Just try both. Maybe you’ll find Gilling or Ezzie. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find both.”
I stared at him for a second, then looked back at the coin. It was bright and shiny as if freshly minted. Since it was an object, it would never wear down. I found I did want to try it. The idea of opening my own rip and traveling into the unknown was seductive. I’d never done that by myself before. Maybe, I thought later, that was exactly what McKesson had been counting on.
I flipped the coin and it landed on the table, clattering as it came up heads. The next time, it rolled off the table and came up tails. The third time, I willed it to land on its edge. Some objects worked that way; you had to give them a suggestion. It rolled onto the carpet. I had to get down on my hands and knees to find it under the couch. It was tails. I got back up and glared at the coin.
McKesson watched me bemusedly. There was something in his manner that tipped me off. He was really enjoying the spectacle of watching me flip the coin over and over.
On the fourth try, I placed the coin on the coffee table and set it on its edge. I put my left forefinger on top to hold the coin lightly in place, then flicked it with my right. It was instantly spinning like a top. It took on that blurred, spherical look that he had described.
Quickly, a rip loomed up between us. It started as a bright spot in the air over the coffee table that grew into a shimmering region of space that twisted with colored light. I knew what it was, having seen the phenomenon before. It was a rip in space, and if I entered it, I would step out of this world and into another.
“You didn’t flip the coin,” McKesson said, chuckling.
“I just remembered you didn’t flip it when you used this thing to bring us home from the lava world.”
“Ah, right,” he said. “You ruined my joke. I was hoping you’d flip it a few dozen more times before figuring out you could just stand it up.”
I reflected that McKesson was full of hilarity—usually at the expense of someone else. “How long will the rip last?”
“Not long. Better step through now.”
I couldn’t see him, as he was sitting on the opposite side of the rip. I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. He seemed too anxious to send me through this particular gateway into the unknown.
I stood up and walked around the rip in a circle. It looked stable enough. But how long could it last? Wouldn’t a coin stop spinning after a time? I couldn’t see the quarter at the bottom of the spinning mass of nothing. It was down there somewhere, but I couldn’t tell if it was still spinning.
“Well, are you going through or not?” McKesson asked as I came around the rip to stare at him. “It’s not going to last forever.”
“You said that. Why don’t you step out with me?”
He shook his head. “This is your mission. You talked to Rostok; you got the assignment. He’s paying you, not me.”
I briefly considered offering to split the money with McKesson. I quickly rejected the idea. I needed all of it to pay my towering stack of bills.
“How do I get back?” I asked.
“What?”
“How do I get back here once the rip dies?”
“You just spin the quarter again.”
“Yeah, but what if—”
“It’s dying!” I heard a third voice say. “You’re taking too long.”
McKesson looked around wildly. The voice was young and female.
“Miss Swanson?” he asked loudly, frowning.
“Of course.”
“Where are you?” McKesson demanded.
“In the pretty colors,” she said, and laughed.
We could both make out her outline now as she stepped inside the rip.
“Careful, don’t go all the way through,” I said. “You should come out of there now.”
She didn’t listen. If there was anything I’d learned about my companion by this time, it was that she had an adventurous spirit.
“You’re under arrest, Miss Swanson,” McKesson said sternly. “And this time, you won’t get away.”
It was my turn to frown.
“You should see this, Quentin,” came Jacqueline’s voice. It sounded fainter than before. “It’s beautiful.”
“Are you going after her, or am I?” I asked McKesson.
He hissed with frustration and shook his head. “You do it.”
“No arrests when I come back?”
He rolled his eyes and snorted. “Fine. Have it your way.”
I stepped up onto the coffee table—only, I wasn’t on the coffee table. Grit crunched beneath my shoes.
I could see the world on the far side now. It was beautiful. The ground glittered and sparkled, carpeted by tiny crystalline prisms. It reminded me of a beach covered by giant white grains of sand. Overhead, stars shone down, huge and bright—almost like mini-suns. There were dozens of them: reds, blues, and whites, but mostly reds. Overall, the level of light was diffused, somewhat like an overcast day at the seashore.
We stood on a hilltop—no, I realized, it was more like a sand dune in a long line of similar white dunes. The place was lovely in a stark, alien way. Jacqueline was staring and spinning around slowly, trying to take it all in at once.
“I never really believed it until now,” she said. She was standing quite close to me. Somehow, the shimmering mixing shape of the rip had caused her form to become visible in outline. Either that, or maybe her power of invisibility didn’t work when she walked inside a rip.
All of a sudden, I saw motion at our feet. I thought I saw a hand snatching something.
The last thing I heard was McKesson’s voice, faintly, as if it came from a great distance away—which I guess it truly did. “You said you wanted to go to a hot world. I hope you enjoy your stay!”
Before I could react, the rip died around us and we were left standing on the gritty, shifting mounds of crystals. They shimmered around our feet like countless tiny jewels.
“This is unbelievable!” Jacqueline gushed. She was fully visible now, and walked around in a circle, kicking up glittery white crystals. “I thought you were going to turn into a bore, but instead, you’ve become the most interesting man I’ve ever met.”
I watched her, staring at the stars. I understood the moment of wonder she was experiencing. To truly stand on the surface of another world, even for a moment, was exhilarating. I recalled doing so myself for the first time, near the Gray Men and their city of stacked cubes.
Jacqueline suddenly stopped walking and looked back the way we’d come. She grabbed at my shirt. Her eyes were big and round.
“What happened?” she asked.
“We’re stranded here, I think. It might not last long—or McKesson might have taken the coin away and closed the rip.”
She looked at me, and the wonder in her eyes was quickly replaced by horror.
We waited, but the rip didn’t reappear. McKesson had screwed us. I was reasonably sure of that much. What I didn’t know was how we were going to get home. It looked like a world he’d described to me once; he’d spoken of brilliant white crystals that hurt his eyes. This had to be the place. I felt like I was standing on a white beach made with huge grains of sand.
Motivated by near panic, I tried hard to recall McKesson’s story—in particular, I tried to remember how he said he’d gotten out of the place. He’d said it was an intensely bright world, one that stood under a brilliant white star. He’d been nearly blinded, and upon finding his way to another distant rip, he’d come home and discovered he’d received a heavy dose of rads. He’d said the doctors told him he would grow tumors eventually. After delivering this disturbing news, the medical people had promptly called in government people, who demanded to kno
w how he’d managed to get a dangerous dose of radiation in downtown Las Vegas. I didn’t relish suffering a similar fate. I related the story to Jacqueline. By the time I was finished, she was terrified.
“I’m so, so sorry, Quentin,” she said. “I should have listened to you and stayed at home. I should have listened to a lot of people.”
“Why don’t you listen to people?” I asked.
“Well, because…well…I don’t know. I screwed up, I guess.”
I smiled with half my face and nodded. If she’d expected an argument from me at this point, she was going to be disappointed.
“But how was I supposed to know that McKesson would pull a stunt like that?” she demanded. “How was I supposed to know he’d strand us out here? That’s inhuman!”
“He must not want us around right now.”
“What a nice way to get rid of us. Well, the air seems breathable, but we’re going to starve, aren’t we?”
I thought it over. “We’ll probably die of thirst or radiation before that.”
She frowned. “Radiation? I’m not convinced about that part of his story. These suns don’t look all that bright. I don’t think they’ll burn us too badly. All the light put together is less than a sunny day at the beach. And if it’s water we’re worried about, we have some time to find another rip to escape through before we die.”
I looked at the sky. She was right; it didn’t match McKesson’s description. The blazing white star was missing. But the white sand-like material that made up the desert floor—that was too similar to his story. Why would he have lied about that or made it up? This world was so similar to what he’d described, I was fairly sure that it was the place he’d been talking about.
“Quentin,” she said. “I think I have it.”
I looked at her.
“I think this is night,” she said. “I think that on this world, the night is full of huge stars. It must be because they are much closer to this planet than the stars are back home. Maybe we are in the middle of a star cluster at the center of the galaxy, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. But this is night, and those small suns overhead are nighttime stars.”
Slowly, the truth of her words dawned on me. I couldn’t come up with another solution that would explain the difference. I didn’t like the answer, but it was inescapable.
