by David Arnold
“Holy shit,” said Lennon.
In no time, the padlock was tossed aside, and as they pulled the thick chain out of the door handles, Nico felt Lennon’s eyes on her. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I mean.”
She smiled, shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Those chances are astronomical. I’m just saying—that can’t be a coincidence.”
“I know.” She shook her head. “I’m just saying—I don’t know.”
Inside, Nico pulled a lighter from her backpack, flicked it on. They were in a small entryway with a split stairwell; going up was the only option, as downstairs was entirely flooded.
On the wall, they found a directory of the building showing four floors: the bottom floor of suites was labeled 1001–1040; the second floor was 2001–2040, and so on with the third and fourth floors. Some of the numbers had worn off, and there was not a single business or store name to be found, each suite entirely unoccupied, with a single exception.
“There.” Nico pointed to the last suite on the fourth floor, number 4040.
Beside it, a single character: O.
She thought back to the morning Echo disappeared, how disappointed she’d been that she’d waited to ask questions, not in hopes of finding answers, but in hopes that Echo might prove her father wrong. This, she knew, was who she was at her weakest.
“Is that the letter O or a zero?” asked Lennon.
Nico turned, started up the stairs, feeling strong for the first time in days. “Neither,” she said, confident that even if the father who’d raised her had lost his mind, the story he’d raised her on was all heart. “It’s a circle.”
Doors
The fourth floor greeted them with an eerie quiet. A single hallway ran the entire length of the building, right down the middle, with doors to offices on either side. Direct access to these offices meant no access to windows, and total darkness. From where they stood, looking down the hallway felt more like staring into a horizontal abyss.
Nico held up the lighter to the nearest door. “Suite 4001.”
“Of course we’re on the wrong end.”
Guided by the miniature flame, they started down the hall. The floors were an old wood, every step a creak or snap. Lining the walls between the office doors were black-and-white photographs of the mills in the early days, pictures that oozed industry and smoke and large iron tools, images of ghostly faces staring out at them as if they’d been caught in the act of living.
The lighter flickered out.
“Shit. Hold up.” Nico dug another lighter out of her bag, was about to flick it on when Lennon grabbed her arm.
“You hear that?”
At first all she could hear was Harry’s panting. Gradually, though, something else: a humming or whirring, but different than the one in the catacombs of Bruno’s church, more fluid. It wasn’t an instrument, but there was musicality to it, a single note buried in the orchestra, pure and sad and you don’t notice it at first, and then once you do, you know the orchestra would be lost without it. And whether because of this humming, or because the Deliverer made no noise at all, Nico and Lennon did not hear a footstep, did not sense a presence, until an electric light at the far end of the hall clicked on, and they saw the black helmet and synthetic suit, the tinted visor, the gloved hands that were not exotic birds—they saw the Deliverer standing there, as if waiting for them.
“Harry,” said Nico, her dog calmly disappearing into the darkness of the hallway before reappearing in the light of the Deliverer’s torch.
Nico whistled him back; he did not come.
The Deliverer bent down, rubbed behind Harry’s ears, and Nico could not deny the sense of relief at finally seeing this person who, for so long, had meant so much to her family. All those Delivery Days, the taco seasoning, the Metallyte chili macs, more pounds of cinnamon than she could count. It was like coming face-to-face with the Wizard of Oz, or Aslan from Narnia. So yes, relief, but also—as she would be if confronted by the Wizard or Aslan—terror.
As they watched from the middle of the hallway, the Deliverer turned, opened a door, and, together with Harry, disappeared through it.
Lennon grabbed her hand before she could start for the door. “Hey,” he said, and Nico thought, Here it is, he’s done, shit has gotten too weird. She couldn’t blame him. Shit had gotten weird, and he didn’t owe her a thing, and Boston awaited, and how was she supposed to say goodbye to him at all, much less like this—
“Your boots are untied.”
“What?”
He pointed down at her feet. “Your laces.”
It was less a hug, more a gentle tackle, a tight wrapping of the arms around the neck, pulling him close. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“I mean—it’s dark. I didn’t want you to trip.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
Maybe it was ridiculous, having this moment now, but as they let go of each other, turned toward suite 4040, Nico couldn’t help feeling that opening this door would somehow close others, more quixotic ones, doors to places where two people got lost in each other beside a fireplace, where wild joy could be found in nothing but the sound of your name on their lips.
“More cameras.” Lennon motioned toward the broken camera hanging from the ceiling. And again, stenciled in frosted glass, the words AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY with the video camera icon.
Nico put a hand on the knob. “You ready?”
“Nico.”
“What.”
He pointed to her boots, and she handed him the lighter, and maybe because her mind was on doors, but as she bent to tie her laces, it occurred to her that this was true friendship: a person in your life who was willing to walk through strange doors into dark places, so long as they could walk there with you.
Controls
The few times she’d imagined a professional office, Nico had pictured a soporific flood of beige carpets and walls, dusty computers and desks with nameplates, neck-high partitions divvying up the room.
This was not that.
The showstopping centerpiece of the room was the ceiling. Though ceiling seemed the wrong word, as the entire thing had been replaced by a great glass dome. Outside, the gray sky had ripened into navy, deep and unending, boasting stars and moon so bright they shone through the clouds, lighting up the room. Snow was coming fast now, an onslaught of flakes hitting the outside of the curved glass and sliding away.
The dome reached its highest in the center of the room, at least six or seven times taller than the outer walls of the suite. The room was large enough on its own, but the glass dome made it feel cavernous.
Harry, she thought, looking around. She was about to whistle when she spotted him sniffing the base of another door, this one leading into a smaller room within the room, an entire corner partitioned behind glass. Inside, what looked like a wall of computers and panels.
Beside her, Lennon muttered, “Control room.”
“Controlling what?”
The larger room was mostly empty. There were no desks or tables; instead four wrought iron posts were positioned in the center of the floor, each as tall as a person, each with a thick chain running between them, roping off the area. Over a dozen video cameras were set up all over the place, each pointed toward this roped-off space.
The Deliverer stood by one of these posts, staring down at the floor, and as Nico and Lennon stepped forward, hand in hand, Nico felt as if they’d slipped into a painting, a feeling that only enhanced when she noticed the Deliverer wasn’t staring at the floor, but through it. The posts and chain were roping off a square hole, some ten feet by ten feet, that had been surgically cut into the floor directly below the apex of the glass dome. As they neared, the Deliverer pointed down, and Nico’s wonderings evolved and multiplied: through the hole, sh
e saw another surgical square had been cut into the floor of the room directly below them, suite 3040, and another square cut into the floor of suite 2040, so that there, four stories down, having flooded the first floor years ago, was a ten-foot-square view of the Merrimack River.
“What time is it?” Nico asked.
Lennon said nothing, just stared through the hole.
“Lennon.”
He looked at his wrist. “Eight twenty.” As he said this, Nico noticed that the Deliverer, in an instinctive reaction to her question, had also looked at a wristwatch: a polished silver band and a face with a skyline . . .
Exactly like Lennon’s.
Before she could process how it was possible a world like theirs might contain two of the same unusual watches, Harry barked behind them. Fully upright, he had both front paws propped against the door to the control room, tail wagging wildly.
She looked at the Deliverer.
A slight nod. Go ahead.
Together with Lennon, she joined Harry at the control room and pushed open the door. Inside, Harry assumed his usual posture, nose to the ground, covering the small square footage in no time. A couple lockers lined the back wall of the room. Everything was coated in layers of dust, a few stacks of papers and files, coffee cups, and a panel of computers and technological equipment with buttons and screens and switches whose functions Nico could only dream of.
“So the geological anomaly happens out there,” said Lennon. “And they monitor it in here.”
On the panel, under a computer screen, Nico spotted a small framed photograph, and when she picked it up, the air rushed out of her as her heart filled, all the physiological comings and goings of the body at once.
“Who’s that?” Lennon looked over her shoulder.
They looked happy in the photo. Somewhere she didn’t recognize. Like that’s really saying something. Probably, it was a restaurant or a movie theater or some friend’s house, one of a hundred places people used to go when people still did things like that. “It’s them,” she said. Her dad was midsentence, talking to someone off camera. Her mom was looking at him, a smile like she knew he was hers. “It’s my parents.” She allowed herself another moment to stare, and then tucked the photo into her bag.
Wherever she was about to go she would want them with her.
Lennon picked up a case of silver pens. Engraved across the front were the words Property of Helen Leibowitz.
“Echo’s mom,” said Lennon.
From a random file, Nico pulled out a chart with four columns: across the top, from left to right, they were marked Tollbooth Entry Date, Name, Destination (hypothesized), Tollbooth Return Date. The first three columns were completely filled with names, dates, places. The last one—Tollbooth Return Date—was empty.
“You figure most of their documentation was digital.” Lennon put a hand on the nearest computer. “Videos, information, years of footage and work. People stored their lives in these. Now they’re just . . . little tombs.”
More files containing pages of transcripts, mostly scientific and difficult to make sense of. More references to “Tollbooth,” which seemed to be used interchangeably with the geological anomaly, and Nico remembered conversations about God and science, Tollbooths and Arks. Ways out.
“‘What had started as make-believe was now very real,’” said Lennon.
“You’re quoting The Phantom Tollbooth now?”
“The what? No, look.” He pointed to the window, where someone had taped a napkin with those handwritten words. “Echo quoted that. Or something close. Said it was in his mom’s journal.”
“When?”
“In the cabin. You’d taken Harry outside to pee, I think. What’s The Phantom Tollbooth?”
Quickly, Nico summarized the story of a boy called Milo who assembled a mysterious tollbooth, which turned out to be a portal to an entirely other world. “Dad used to read it to me all the time.”
“Look at this.” Lennon held out a file with a piece of paper containing a list of cities in which other geological anomalies had been documented: Madrid, Alexandria, Bend, Seoul, Lima, Missoula, Asheville. The document also outlined concern regarding military interference, and a brief debate over the origins of the anomalies, whether they were earthly or alien. “‘Wherever it originates,’” Lennon read, “‘whatever its biological makeup, however far down it goes, when one considers the cities in which anomalies have been documented, it is relatively safe to assume they manifest themselves through, or near, water. If harnessing the Tollbooth is priority, sound is key.’ Signed ‘EA.’”
A sudden memory, sitting with her father on the attic deck, drenched to the bone. He raised his face to the sky to drink the rain . . . “Sound travels through water much faster than it does through air.”
“Really?”
Through the glass, Nico saw the Deliverer watching them, and when Harry exited the control room, Nico followed. “When water moves, sound feels it,” she said, still in the memory, walking toward the Deliverer, Lennon behind her. “When sound changes, water is affected,” and somewhere in the building the humming sound returned, same as before only amplified, and the floor under their feet groaned, and all went abruptly quiet.
Overhead, thousands of shadows danced, white snow against the bright moon, and Nico knew it was more than just the Deliverer that had been waiting for her: it was this time, and this place.
“It’s happening.”
The humming crescendoed, whirring and sonorous, a deafening drone that sunk its claws into the room, and when it rose to meet them, it came slowly, as if ashamed of its own volume: it started with only a few drops of water floating up through the square hole, and then a dozen drops became hundreds, a slow-motion rain in reverse. The bass of the drone dropped out, the sound now a freestyle glissando, the most beautiful musical noise Nico had ever heard. She could see it clearly: the note of the Bell flying over miles of treetops, and the Cormorant catching that note, amplifying it, aiming it toward the river. She looked down at her hands, then at Lennon and Harry, a need to confirm some anchor of reality, that the laws of physics were still in play. But it was only the water breaking these laws, the Merrimack River floating upward in pieces. Drops of water poured in by the thousands now, well organized and of one mind, flying around the room in a massive formation like some miraculous flock of tiny birds.
Like the Flies.
And then—as one—the flock connected, the waterdrops combined into a single shape in midair: the bottom of the circle hovered inches over the carpet; the top reached the apex of the glass dome; and the great circle of water began to spin, slowly at first, then faster, then much faster until Nico felt mist on her face. And here, in a place called Kairos, in the presence of the nameless, faceless Deliverer, she stared into the center of the spinning water and saw a second night sky, a second snow, a second woods. “How can I fight this darkness?” she asked, knowing the answer before the Deliverer said it. Little details of the story changed with each telling, but the ending was always the same.
“In you go, my dear.”
Watches
The Deliverer stepped forward, held out a handful of books. “You’ll need these.”
Nico thought it was the voice of a woman, though the helmet and visor made it hard to say for sure.
“Go on,” said the Deliverer. There were three books, thick and red. “Take them.”
As soon as they were in Nico’s hands, she felt their age. Old leather wound together by a black cord. The edges of the journals were brown and worn, the black cord had clearly been wrapped and unwrapped thousands of times.
“Wait. Where did you get that watch?” Lennon looked down at his own, confirming it hadn’t been stolen.
The Deliverer ignored Lennon, pointed to the middle of the spinning water, the second night and snow, the second bright moon. “Jump.”
“You jump,” said Lennon. “I want to know where you got that watch.”
Staring into the water-circle, Nico felt two emotions at once: relief that her father was still alive to ring the Bell and curiosity as to where this thing led. The truth was, it didn’t really matter where it led or how it got here. Whether alien or machine or black hole on Earth, Nico felt planted in a new light of love: that she knew her father, and he knew her.
She was going to jump. She hadn’t come all this way for nothing.
Harry was beside her now, and as she bent down, pulled him into a tight hug, her heart outgrew her insides, and she cried, whispering promises of triple-rationed strawberry granola. She tucked the red journals into her bag—and her eyes landed on the drawing Kit had given her.
It’s probably not very good, he’d said. But it’s part of me.
He’d asked her not to open it in front of him. And she heard his sweet voice . . . Maybe someday you’ll find the perfect spot to hang it . . .
“Nico.”
She tucked the drawing safely under the red journals, closed her bag, and stood. “Harry is going to love Boston,” she said, wiping tears with the sleeve of her coat, trying to smile.
“You’re really doing this.”
“Like I said. Dad gave me his story. This is me, taking care of it.”
She put a hand on Lennon’s cheek, and she knew why this goodbye felt different. Lennon was the only person she’d ever considered in the full context of time: not only past and present, but future, too. “So you know how everyone thinks this is the end of the world?” she asked, feeling those years slip between their hands.
“Not everyone thinks that.”
As their foreheads touched, images swam from one mind to the other, pictures of lives unlived, loves unloved, a host of possibilities beyond what might be offered to two people raised in the fucked-up Age of the Fly. Lennon reached down, pulled off his wristwatch, and Nico pretended she didn’t know this would happen, pretended she couldn’t hear his voice in his eyes.
