by Jack Castle
As far as bedrooms went, this one wasn’t bad. It was kind of like the one he’d grown up in as a kid. A bird chirping drew his gaze outside the window. He didn’t see the tweeting bird, but he did see the leaves of the trees dripping with water as though from a recent downpour.
Wait, this isn’t right. I was on a deep dive…underwater. More images began coming back to him. I remember something about a malt shop. And…I was running out of air.
As though confirming this, the dented, beaten helmet continued to stare silently back at him. A modified diving suit was draped over the back of the helmet’s chair. It would’ve been far too heavy for the thin metal-wire hangers that hung in the closet like skeletons.
Metal wire hangers…I forgot about those. I haven’t seen those since I was kid. Modern hangers were plastic junk.
The modest room was sparse when it came to furniture. Aside from the single bed he woke up in and the chair holding his helmet and dive suit, there was only a night table and a midsize dresser. George noted his clothes were neatly folded on top of the latter.
He stood up and a sharp pain shot through his leg. Wincing from it, he decided to move a bit more slowly, at least until he got the blood flowing into his limbs once more. He stared at himself in the dresser mirror and saw his normal visage, wearing boxers and a t-shirt, staring back at him.
He waited for someone to come in. When they didn’t, he put a hand on the door knob of the six-panel door. Expecting it to be locked, he was surprised when he turned the knob and it opened right up.
He took one step into the hallway laden with hardwood floors. Gazing down the off-white hallway, he saw other bedrooms with their doors open and stairs at the end of the hall. He remembered spotting the leaves outside the window and realized he was on the second floor of a house.
I can’t go running around in my skivvies, he thought, and went back into the room to dress.
The clothes on the dresser were a pair of khaki pants and a short-sleeved polyester shirt. They weren’t his, but they fit perfectly. Feeling a chill in the air, he picked up the heavy fisherman’s sweater and slipped it on as well. More than the rest of the garments, this seemed the most familiar.
He seemed to recall his dive suit had a knife. A real big one too, about the size of a machete, but staring around the room, and checking under the bed, he couldn’t find it.
Not wasting anymore time, George went downstairs and entered the kitchen. What he had first assumed to be a farmhouse, was actually more similar to the houses in the late 1950’s or early 60’s suburbia. There was an old style fridge, the kind with the big honking chrome handle. The rest of the house could have passed for a television set on Lassie or Leave it to Beaver. Spotting the refrigerator again, his stomach groaned for attention. If only there was some…the heavy refrigerator door opened with a loud cracking sound, and he was surprised to find the interior stocked with apples, a jar of pickles, a pitcher of lemonade, and plenty of sandwich meat.
I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I’m starving.
It occurred to him that the food might be poison. Every time he had woken up in this world, there was always that chance. But why bring me back to life only to kill me again?
‘Why, for their amusement.’
Oh, haven’t heard from that guy in a while, George thought.
George’s inner voice (his Jiminy Cricket, if you will) had always been the voice of Jimmy Stewart. Or, to be more precise, the character Jimmy Stewart played in the Christmas movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The character’s name was George Bailey.
This sparked a new memory. It was more than a coincidence that he and George Bailey shared the same name. He was actually named after that character. Something about how his parents had been watching it about a month before he was born and they both said at the same time, “What about George?” and that was it. That would be his name for the rest of his life.
He stuffed an apple in his mouth and loaded his arms up with as much food as he could carry. As he dropped it all on the modest kitchen table, a hot, fresh baked loaf of bread caught his attention. Was that there a second ago? He was pretty sure he would have noticed the delicious smell. Regardless, he grabbed the bread. Even though he was in a survival situation, he took the time to grab some butter out of the fridge.
One of these drawers has got to have a butter knife in it. Grabbing the first drawer closest to him, he slid it open. It was a junk drawer filled with scissors, and scotch tape, even a big brown ball of rubber bands. Huh, I guess junk drawers are universal. He scanned the junk drawer a second time and realized when he moved the drawer back and forth, nothing inside the drawer moved. It’s a fake. I couldn’t take any of this stuff out, even if I wanted to. So, there are limitations to this place. He tugged on another drawer and as soon as he heard the jangle of silverware he declared, “Jackpot.”
George buttered the fresh baked bread. Wow, it even smells good, he thought, but as he enjoyed the first bite, he was forced to wonder who had baked it for him.
Jimmy Stewart’s voice popped in his head again. ‘Stop asking so many questions there, Georgie, and just enjoy your food. Just this once. Whadya say?’
George gulped down two thick slices of buttered bread. On his third, he spotted a white hat through the window of the front door.
“Uh, hey!” George said reflexively, getting up from the dining room table. He had gotten up a bit too fast and slammed his pelvic bone painfully against the corner of the table. He dashed out of the kitchen and into the living room. He couldn’t help but notice the massive, wood-framed television set on the floor with rabbit ears on top. Its wood frame matched the coffee table perfectly.
Reaching the door, George clasped the handle half-expecting nobody to be there, just like the ghosts had vanished in the malt shop. That’s why he was surprised when he flung the door open and saw a thin short-statured man walking down the concrete pathway out to the sidewalk. The man was carrying a metal, wire-framed carrier of a half-dozen, empty milk bottles.
George exited the house and began yelling, “Hey, buddy, excuse me,” but the milkman, who was whistling a happy tune to himself, either didn’t hear him or chose to ignore him.
George was about to pursue the milkman when he tripped over bottles of milk left behind in a little wire-framed crate left on the stoop. Lifting his eyes from the broken bottles of milk to the curb, George watched as the milkman marched into the open sliding door of his truck, sat down promptly, turned the ignition, put the vehicle in gear, and drove off.
George stumbled all the way down the driveway. Reaching the curb, he watched the milkman drive off and turn down a distant corner.
Looking in the other direction, George could see now that he was on a typical suburban street in the 1950’s.
How did I get here?
‘Maybe you traveled back in time, Georgie. After all, I did. Why not you, too?’
“Stow it, Jimmy,” he said aloud. Tessa had long ago broken him of his habit of talking to Jiminy Stewart, but it seemed the bad habit had resurfaced.
His memory was all a jumble. It hurt his head every time he tried to remember.
He scanned the neighborhood a bit more. All the houses were the same size, and roughly the same architecture. But each of them had their own color schemes and landscaping; the same, but different enough to express individuality. In its entirety, it was an attractive street, pleasantly wide, with ample sidewalks and numerous streetlamps. He didn’t remember neighborhood streets ever being this wide, even in his youth.
Instinctively, he thought, Tessa and I should look into moving here.
‘Sounds fine to me, Georgie. Just fine.’
George took a few more steps down the street. Further memories were coming to light. The Leisure-bot, the moon-pool, and the world’s most annoying mermaid.
But how did I get from the Welcome Center to a 1950’s neighborhood?
A dive suit. The same suit that was in the upstairs bedroom. It was comi
ng back faster now. A gaping hole, in the roof a dome, over a town. A town that looked a lot like this one.
George lifted his eyes and expected to see a dome overhead. But he didn’t see anything of the sort. All he saw was a blue sky, with a yellow sun. It was a nice day. A flock of Canadian geese were flying south for the winter in a V-formation. He could only assume it was south because the sun was directly overhead and he didn’t have a compass. He was about to tear his eyes away from the cloudless sky, when he saw a flock of birds flying in V-formation.
Wait a minute? Is that the same flock of birds?
He scanned the rest of the sky, but saw only the one flock.
Either that was deja vu or the image of those birds just repeated itself.
He watched the sky a little longer, but the birds only continued to fly off. Was that some kind of mistake? A glitch? Am I looking at the inside of the dome but it’s a holographic projection of the sky? If that’s the case, where’d all the water go?
As though in answer, a memory assaulted him. He was in a malt shop, submerged underwater. His oversized gloves were reaching out to a ridiculously gargantuan lever; and he was pulling it down.
Did that seal the hole in the dome and drain the water?
Armed with this theory, George studied the houses a bit more. Even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the gutters were still overflowing with water and every leaf and surface was dripping with moisture. Everything was soaking wet, the pavement, the street and sidewalk.
Across the street, George saw a brightly-colored star fish stuck fast to the windshield of an old station wagon. The more he looked, the more he saw other starfish stuck to other windows. Still further, he saw many of the houses were covered in algae, but even now seemed to be evaporating with the meeting of air.
In the sewer at the end of the street, George was pretty sure he glimpsed an octopus, one about the size of large dog, clinging to the sewer opening before being pulled into the drainage system below by torrents of water.
So, this was the town I floated into. I still don’t know where all the water could have gone.
He was about to take another step into the street and nearly stepped onto the louvered slits cut into the street.
Whoa.
The louvers were so well disguised that he didn’t even see them before. Now that he was standing over them, he could see in-between the cracks. Watching the water rush down into them, he was reminded of the torrential Florida downpours as a kid. He and his little brother would make sailboats out of old newspapers and watch them voyage down into the gutters. Several fish swam by and when one got left behind by the departing water, George bent down and helped it along until it went down the drain.
As the last of the water flowed into the louvers, they mechanically snapped closed and became a street once more.
So why let it flood in the first place? he wondered.
Ring-Ring!
George dodged nimbly out of the way when a young boy wearing a striped shirt and baseball cap rode by him on a bicycle with balloon tires, large fenders and a hulking frame.
“Hey mister,” he said. It had come out ‘Hey, Misth-tir’ because the freckle-faced boy was missing his two front teeth.
“Wait, can I talk to you?” George called out after the boy.
But the boy kept peddling merrily along.
George turned to check the direction the kid had come from to see if anybody else was coming. There wasn’t. He turned back around in the direction of the boy on the bicycle, but he was gone, despite the fact that the street went on for several blocks.
Another ghost? Was the milkman a ghost too?
He seemed real enough.
George looked to where the milkman had dropped off the small crate of glass milk bottles. Milk continued to drip off the front stoop where he had tripped over glass bottles and broken them earlier.
No. Whatever the milkman was, he wasn’t a ghost. Not like the kid on the bicycle.
He scanned both ends of the street. The suburbia seemed endless. Glancing back at his house (Well, it wasn’t his house, merely the one he had woken up in), he decided he needed a higher vantage point.
He walked back up to the concrete path, stopped at the stoop and took the time to pick up the only remaining milk bottle.
“Meow!”
A black cat had come out of the bushes and immediately began lapping up the spilt milk. He thought about petting it, but George had never really been much of a cat person. He was more of a dog guy. It was Maddie who really loved cats. He decided to let the cat be.
Taking the milk inside the house, he opened it up. Smells fresh, just like the bread, he thought, and immediately drank half of it down. He was about to leave the nearly empty bottle on the dining room table but for whatever reason, he decided to play along, and took the time to walk back into the kitchen and put it in the fridge.
He could feel the cold air within.
The frigid air made him realize it had been freezing outside. Even though the boy had been in shorts and a striped t-shirt and the milkman only his uniform, George remembered seeing his breath in the air. It’s still cold. They might’ve removed the water from the town, but as of yet, they still hadn’t had time to remove the cold from the air.
He jogged back upstairs to his room. Again, it wasn’t his room, but he had come to think of it as much. Moving to the window, he saw the reflection of sunlight on all the moisture of the leaves.
Putting both hands on the windowsill, he leaned out. From the higher vantage point he could see other houses. Lots of them. They all had antennas on them. Thick, heavy gruesome things, of different sizes and shapes; all designed to carry TV airwaves into houses for free TV. Gosh, I forgot about those too.
Beyond the rooftops, George could just make out the center of a town. So, he was in suburbia but nearby was a downtown area. A large water tower loomed over the houses like one of those giant robots from Orson Wells, War of the Worlds. George read the lettering upon it: SAFE HAVEN.
Safe Haven? When I was being held captive by the Zombie-Pirate-King, didn’t the Lamppost Man say something about not bringing Tessa to the Sanctuary? That’s what they want. George still didn’t know who they were, but it seemed pretty important that Tessa never reach the Sanctuary. Did he mean this place?
Tessa… why can’t I remember what happened to Tessa? A flash of his wife standing at the railing of The Dauntless, tucking her hair behind her ear, whooshed across his mind. What happened? For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. It made him sick to his stomach not knowing, or was there another reason?
He left the windowsill behind and went back downstairs. He was about to go back outside, but saw a door that most likely led to the garage.
‘Say, Georgie. Now there’s an idea. Why walk when you can ride?’
Opening the door to the garage he saw an old light-blue pickup truck, a real antique too, maybe 1950’s, but in mint condition.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted truck keys on a hook mounted near the door. That’s convenient. Instinctively, he twirled the ring of keys around his finger as he walked around the hood of the truck, opened the driver’s side door and hopped in behind the wheel.
The truck fired right up.
BUH-BUH-BUH-BUH…
George checked the truck cab’s visor for a garage door opener and realized, Duh, this is 1950’s. They didn’t have remote control openers back then.
He got back out of the truck, but left the motor running. Gas wasn’t an issue, it had three-quarters of a tank. While he opened the garage door he wondered, Why three-fourths of a tank? Why not a full tank, or even a quarter of a tank?
The garage door was locked but it was a simple fix, and he slid the inside bolt restraining it. Hopping back behind the wheel, he saw the truck had a clutch. Fortunately for him, his first pickup had a clutch just like this one. So, it was easy for him to put it in drive.
George drove the truck down to the end of the driveway and st
opped. He checked for traffic, checked for the kid on the bicycle, and even checked for the milkman and his truck. He didn’t see any of those things. So, he hit his turn indicator that went PLUNK-PLUNK, PLUNK-PLUNK until he completed the turn. Using the old-style hand crank, he rolled down the window, placed his elbow on the frame and headed into town in the same direction the milkman had gone.
As George left his house behind, he didn’t see the bloated corpse sticking out of the bushes across the street.
If he had, he would have recognized the man immediately.
It was him.
Chapter 20
Downtown
George drove past a water tower, an elementary school, and an old movie theater playing, Alice in Wonderland.
‘Well, we certainly tumbled down the rabbit hole this time, didn’t we, Georgie-boy?’
Ignoring Jimmy, he continued on past the post office where Old Glory was already dried out and flapping briskly in the wind. That is, if it was a flag. It occurred to George that the flag might be another hologram, like the sky and the birds. It certainly made the most sense since everything else was still soaking wet, and yet the flag was flapping briskly in the summer breeze that was non-existent.
Whatever Safe Haven used to be, it was now broken. Despite these minor nuisances, it was the perfect town with its white picket fences and well-manicured lawns.
Coming into town, George saw it was little more than a crossroads with buildings to either side. There was a saloon and barber shop on one side of the street, with the court house, bank and antique shop on the other. A tiny park broke up the buildings and came equipped with a white bandstand and a modest playground. This was no eco-friendly plastic playground either; the slides were made of steel and the swings rubber and chain. Despite the bizarre circumstances, the town was beginning to grow on him.
He slowed the truck’s speed to about 5 mph when he passed the Malt Shop he had visited earlier. Directly across the street from the Malt Shop was City Hall. Thus far, he hadn’t seen a single other person; only parked cars of the same era.
