Fixer (34 page)

“Hi,” he said. His words echoed. That hadn’t gone away.
So much for the miracle of caffeine
. “I faint?”

“Yeah,” Maggie said. “When’s the last time you ate?”

“Dunno,” he answered, speaking over her question. “I was wondering the same thing a little while ago.”

“You should listen to me,” the boy said. He was still around, hanging by the sliding doors of the closet.

“I told you not to follow me,” he said.

Everyone else in the room stared at the closet door Corrigan was talking to.

“Is he here now?” Maggie asked quietly.

“That’s just one of my ghosts,” Corrigan explained, skipping ahead in the conversation a couple of steps. “Thinks he’s special because he helped me get up here. I couldn’t follow the directions. Compound sentences are a problem right now.”

“If you just listen to me, I’ll tell you when to talk,” the kid said. “I know where the present is.”

“You do?”

“Corrigan, what’s happened to you?” Maggie asked. He looked over to the boy, who nodded.

“Haven’t slept for a while is all. My head’s a bit of a mess.”

“Ghosts?”

Nod.

“People I didn’t save. Long story. Hey, kid, this’ll work.”

“Told you,” the kid said, smiling. Having a hallucination that was not only offering to help, but was successfully doing so, was certainly weird, but no weirder than anything else he’d had to deal with lately. He decided not to overthink it.

“You’re him.” 

The voice was a quiet one, and it came from the bed. Erica Smalls was boring holes into him.

“Hi,” he said. “Corrigan Bain, fixer, raving madman. Nice to meet you.”

“I met this guy before,” Tanya said/was saying/was about to say. “After you were attacked. Some kinda—”

“Can you really see the future?” Erica asked.

He nodded. “Right now I can’t
not
, which is a problem. But yeah. I’m sorry, I’m usually much more charming. It’s just been a long week. Hey. Lemme ask you something. Were you in Downtown Crossing, a little before five in the afternoon, day you were attacked?”

“You’re doing good,” the kid said near the closet door. “Didn’t think you could say that much at once.”

“Thanks,” he said to the kid. “Trick is to just keep talking, I guess.”

Erica glanced back over at the empty space where Corrigan’s ghost companion was standing. Upon reflection, he realized this was probably disconcerting for everyone else.

“You’re freaking them out,” agreed the ghost.

“Um . . . Tanya?” Erica asked, looking at her friend, who was still staring at Corrigan and wondering if he was going to tear off his clothing and announce he was the King of Prussia or something. “Downtown Crossing? I can’t remember.”

“Yeah, we were there,” Tanya said. To Corrigan she said, “Why d’you ask?”

“He must have been stalking you all day,” Corrigan said, shooting a look at Maggie, who was nodding. “He can alter the future, like I can. Like Harvey could.”

“Harvey?” Maggie asked. “Who’s Harvey?”

“Not important. My point—”

“That woman you couldn’t save,” Maggie said, filling in the rest.

“Yeah.”

“Go ahead, tell her who I am,” Harvey said. He and a chair had just appeared next to the kid. Corrigan thought it was good thinking, him bringing his own chair.

“She doesn’t need to know that, Harvey,” Corrigan said.

Erica, her curiosity overwhelming any outstanding concerns she might be holding about his ongoing conversations with nonexistent people, asked, “So how does it work? Do you see an entire
chronoton
at once, or—”

“Chrono what?” Corrigan asked.

“That’s what we called it. The period of virtual certain future time, up to the border of manifestly equivalent probabilities.”

“The hell is she talking about?” Harvey asked.

“Too many big words,” the boy agreed.

“You’re going to have to use smaller words,” Corrigan said. “We can’t . . . I can’t understand you.”

Erica explained. “The arrow of time moves down the most likely path, statistically, but the further away it gets from the present, the less likely it becomes. There was an uncertainty border we couldn’t see beyond.”

“They figured out how to do what I can do?” Corrigan asked Maggie.

“Would’ve told you about it if you’d answered your phone,” she said.

“And how far ahead was this border?” he asked Erica.

“Depended on how much was going on. I bet it’s the same for you.”

“What’s she mean?” Harvey asked. “This is interesting.”

“Yes, it is,” Corrigan said. “What do you mean, ‘depended’?”

“Do you have a harder time in crowds?” she asked.

“Yeah. The future gets all mucked up.”

“That’s because the
chronoton
is smaller the more variables there are, so you can’t see as far ahead as you’re accustomed to. That must make you very anxious.”

“Did you see the whole . . .
chronoton
, is it? Did you see it all at once with this machine of yours?” Corrigan asked.

“No, just the end of it. We had some problems with infinities whenever we tried working out the numbers for a period of less than one
chronoton
. At first we thought it was a flaw in our methodology, but when I redid the calculations, I realized it’s because there’s a qualitative difference between the points at the end of it and the period in the middle. The present and the lead edge of the
chronoton
 . . . resonate. Kind of. I think of them as octaves. Anyway, that’s probably more than you wanted to know . . .”

“S’okay,” Corrigan said. “Sounds interesting.”

She blushed. “That’s why we looked at the other end of the
chronoton
. It was the only place we
could
look.”

He said, “I guess Archie Calvin was onto something after all. Almost makes me wish I had paid more attention to him.”

Tanya, who looked confused by the whole conversation, asked, “So now what happens? Are you here to protect her or something?”

“Unless she can wheel that machine of hers in here, I’m the only one who can see him.”

“It’s broken,” Erica said. “And it wasn’t portable, anyway. But how are you going to stop him if you’re stuck in the same end of the
chronoton
as the rest of us?”

“No idea.”

*  *  *

Time passed. Sustenance was located for Corrigan in the form of a few Snickers bars from the commissary. Maggie, after finding time to sneak outside for a desperately needed cigarette, took up a spot on the chair on the other side of Erica’s bed. Erica’s parents checked in via telephone from their hotel room a few miles down the road. Tanya left a few minutes after the call, having been assured that Maggie wouldn’t go anywhere and that Corrigan was motivated by good intentions and wasn’t usually insane.

Corrigan stayed right where he was—in the quite comfortable reclining chair in the corner of the room—and watched for Kilroy to darken the door. And since, for the past week, he’d been unable to get any sleep at all, now that he had a solid reason for staying awake, he was quite sure he would. Then, of course, he fell asleep.

He woke up back in his bedroom, which was the first indication that he wasn’t awake at all. This was another of his hauntings. Still, it seemed real enough to have him questioning whether the entire trip to Erica Smalls’s hospital room was the dream.

“She’s coming,” the kid said. He was standing at the foot of the bed again. There was a different quality to the ghosts when they showed up in his dreams than when they turned up as hallucinations. He couldn’t quite pin down what it was, other than that they tended to be less helpful.

“She can’t come now. I have to be someplace,” Corrigan said.

“She’s coming. Because you’ve been bad. You need to be punished.”

“Christ,” he said, rubbing his own forehead. “Enough already.”

“Who’re we expecting?”

Corrigan turned and discovered Harvey sitting in the bed next to him. “Oh wonderful,” he said. “I bet Ames would love to hear about this.”

“Wasn’t my idea. Now who’s coming?”

“It’s . . . ah . . .”

“The first,” answered Steve. He was a construction worker who’d fallen to his death because Corrigan couldn’t get past the foreman in time to warn him. He was lying on the floor next to the bed in much the same position in which he’d died.

“Her name was Diane,” Corrigan said. “First message I ever got.”

“Corrrrrigan . . .” Her voice felt like a hand around his throat. He lay back in the bed and tried to pull up the covers, hoping he would wake up sometime soon.
I can’t do this now,
he thought.
I have to be awake . . . for something . . .

“You screwed up your first appointment?” Harvey asked. He didn’t look frightened at all.

“Didn’t know it was an appointment. I’d just gotten your money, and—”

“What did you do?” Diane roared from everywhere at once.

“And all I knew was I was supposed to show up someplace. I watched her die.”

“Well, this is not at all what I expected from you, boy. Frightened by a loud voice? Honestly. I thought you were made of tougher stuff.”

“It gets worse.”

“
What did you do
?”

“She was crossing the street to pick up her children when someone blew through a red light,” Corrigan said quietly. “The kids . . . they were standing right there when—”

The bed started to shake. It felt like it was on the back of something large and awful and that large and awful thing was trying to buck it free. Corrigan held onto the bed sheets for dear life. Harvey still didn’t seem bothered, like a man sipping tea on a boat in high seas.

“What a coward,” Harvey spat. “You were braver when you were twelve, young man.”

“What do you expect me to do?” Corrigan asked. “It’s my fault. I can’t change that.”

An arm burst through the middle of the mattress and grabbed Corrigan by the ankle. He let out a scream.
Wake up, wake up, wake up . . .

“You didn’t kill her.”

Corrigan was being pulled down through the middle of his bed. He reached up and grabbed the bedpost. He didn’t know what would happen if he got sucked down because he always woke up before it happened. But he was never this tired before.

“I let her die, isn’t that close enough?” he shouted to Harvey. The disemboweling of his bed was making a horrendous noise, like a dump truck being torn in half.

“
Join us down here
!”

“Oh quiet, woman,” Harvey barked. “And no, Corry, it is certainly not close enough. I killed Osgood Pierce, remember? It took six months and a bout of sepsis to finally do him in, but I pulled the trigger.
That
is killing someone. You neglected to save her, and that’s completely different. You didn’t know any better at the time.”

“Tell
her
that,” Corrigan said. He was losing his grip on the bedpost. A second hand reached up and grabbed his other leg, and he couldn’t wake up—and he was pretty sure he had just wet himself. Violet would yell at him for that.

“All right,” Harvey said. He leaned forward and grabbed one of Diane’s wrists, pulling her hand loose from Corrigan’s leg with about as much trouble as one might remove an ant from a picnic table. “Go haunt the guy who was driving the car!” he shouted into the widening hole in the middle of the bed.

Corrigan pulled harder on the bedpost and somehow freed his other leg himself.

“
Join us
!” Diane wailed.

“No,” Corrigan said quietly, but firmly. “I have to be someplace.”

“He’s here,” the boy said.

“What?” Corrigan asked. The kid had moved from the foot of the bed to the side, and was staring Corrigan in the face.

“
He’s here
.”

Corrigan woke with a start. He was back in the hospital again, still sitting in the chair. The lights in the room had been dimmed, probably by some helpful nurse. He could see Erica lying in her bed, breathing steadily. Maggie was in the chair next to the bed, still in her fabulous evening gown, which was probably being ruined. She’d rested her head on the side of the mattress and fallen asleep that way. 

And standing at the door, staring right at him, was Kilroy.

*  *  *

Don’t let them know you can see them.

Harvey’s words came back like a splash of ice water in the face. It was pleasantly surprising that Harvey wasn’t there saying it to him, meaning perhaps the short amount of sleep he’d just gotten had been enough to clear his head.

The creature—Kilroy—looked to have more in common with a species of bird than with a human being. His bald head was slightly oblong, perched atop a long buzzard neck. His nose, which came to a very precise point, seemed beak-like. And his eyes were black and without pupils. But there were other aspects that bespoke of entirely different species of animal. His head was cocked, which seemed nearly canine. The sides of his mouth curled up almost past his ears, and his lips didn’t completely cover a row of teeth that looked shark-like. His body—which appeared almost too skinny to support the weight of his head—came with arms that were too long, like an ape. That was, Corrigan realized, just an illusion. It wasn’t the arms that were long, it was the fingers. They extended so far from the wrist, there had to be an extra joint involved. In one of those hands the creature had a wooden bat, the end of which dragged along the floor.

The overall picture was of something only nearly human. It was the thing you see at the edge of your vision but which disappears when you turn your head. It was the thing that went bump in the night. It was the boogeyman. And it was really there.

Corrigan looked away quickly, mindful of Harvey’s warning and the general lessons McClaren had taught him. Kilroy hated to be noticed, and once he got a taste for mayhem he seem to enjoy it.

Is this the same one Harvey shot?

“Maggie,” Corrigan said. “Maggie, wake up.”

Kilroy turned his gaze to Maggie’s still form. She stirred a few seconds later. 

“Whu . . . Corrigan, what is it?” Maggie asked. “Is it—”