Restoration (27 page)

  "Glad you think so, now back to the subject at hand… where do we go from here?"

  Carruthers sighed, dabbing at his mouth with the serviette. "An excellent question and one I don't even begin to know the answer to."

  "You think Max Headroom has any more advice?"

  "I have no idea who you're talking about and you know it," Carruthers replied, selecting a donut with strawberry icing.

  "You know, the Grumpy Controller from the house… 'Home Town!'" Miles mimed the exploding TV set.

  "Even if he does his last suggestion didn't get us all that far did it?"

  "No, suppose not." Miles sipped at his coffee, thinking about what they knew. It didn't take him long, they knew so little. "We need to get him back to the House," he said finally.

  Carruthers looked quizzically at him. "Why?"

  "His power's limited there isn't it? Here he'll just get more and more powerful. At least if we could get him back inside the House then he would be under control."

  "
Fairly
under control," Carruthers said, "he was hardly powerless even there."

  Miles shrugged. "Best plan I can think of, don't ask me how we manage it though."

  "Would the box work do you think?" Carruthers asked. "Not that we have it mind you…"

  "Even if we did, how do you get it into his hands and then place him in danger…" Miles shook his head, "if we could put him in the sort of life-threatening situation that would unlock the box then we wouldn't need to use it in the first place."

  "True." Carruthers finished his donut and sat back with his coffee. "If we knew what he was after that would help."

  "Would it?"

  "Any knowledge is better than none," said Carruthers, "even if we can't stop him maybe we can scotch his plans… I don't know, just trying to think around the situation."

  "Well, he wants something to do with Home Town," Miles said, "and we know the man to talk to about that."

  Carruthers pulled his notebook out and flipped to the page with Loomis' number. "Indeed we do!"

  "Wonder if they have a phone here." Miles looked around.

  "I see it," said Carruthers, getting to his feet.

  "I'll do it," Miles suggested.

  "I'm perfectly capable of operating a telephone," Carruthers replied, "we did have those you know."

  "They've changed a bit," Miles said but Carruthers had already left. He listened to the explorer as he became more and more irate with the pay-phone. Eventually the waitress came to his assistance, explaining the basic principles.

  He returned to the table. "The infernal thing demands money," he said, "have you got any?"

  Miles nodded, Tom had pressed a bunch of notes into his hand earlier. "Pocket money," he had said with a chuckle. Miles wondered if he had already intended to run off and abandon them then. He thought he probably had.

  He handed Carruthers a five dollar note. "You'll have to get the waitress to break it."

  Carruthers sighed and took the note to the counter. "My colleague tells me you can break this for me," he said, offering her the note, "though why it should need breaking before it's of use is beyond me."

  She put her hand on her hip and give him an earnest pout. "It really is a different world where you guys come from ain't it?"

  "So I increasingly realise my dear lady. I am quite lost."

  She thought for a while before handing him his change. "Well," she said finally, "I get off at four, I dare say I might be able to show you around a little," she gave a him a little wink. "Donuts ain't all I'm queen of, honey."

 

 

The stranger had directed Hughie back to his house so they could fetch Chester. Looking in the rearview mirror at the young man's vacant face, Hughie had to wonder why.

  "Now find us some food and drink," the stranger said, "a restaurant, somewhere we can sit and think."

  Hughie couldn't imagine eating a thing but did as he was directed, swinging off the Interstate at the next junction and cruising until he found somewhere offering food. Clocking the sign of a Ponderosa Steakhouse he pulled in. The stranger looked over his shoulder at Chester.

  "Stay here", he said, "there's a good boy. Daddy wants his meat."

  He got out of the car. Stopped, turned around to stare at Hughie who was still sat in the driver's seat. "Well come on then," the stranger said, "I'm not eating on my own."

  Reluctantly, Hughie got out of the car and followed him into the restaurant.

  "Hi," a waitress gushed, neon smile framed by parted bangs dyed a shade of candy-floss pink. "You guys hungry?"

  "Always," the stranger replied, with an expansive smile of his own.

  Their waitress – Amy and only
too
happy to help she assured them – showed them to a booth in the far corner. On the stereo, The Eagles suggested they
Take it to the Limit
, Hughie was fairly confident his companion needed no encouragement on that score.

  "Pair of T-Bones," the stranger told Amy, "so rare you could ride them to our table."

  "I'm not hungry…" Hughie said but the stranger fixed him with a look that told him the order would not be up for discussion. Hughie looked at the waitress and felt such a heavy wave of sadness he could have cried. Look at you, he thought, with your pink hair and your butterwouldn't-melt smile… You have
no
idea. Nor should she, he reasoned, this was no world of hers. He just nodded at her. "T-Bone's fine."

  "Okay," she replied, relieved that things were going to be simple, for a moment there she thought the black guy was going to grab hold of her and start bawling. He had the look of a man on the edge of a breakdown, she realised, thinking of her friend, Darla's father when he had lost his job. Whenever she had gone round to Darla's house that guy had been sat in his easy chair staring blankly at the TV. He had been rigid as a waxwork. Any minute now, he had seemed to say, I'm going to come to life and tear the shit out of this place with my bare hands,
any minute now
. This guy seemed the same, one little nudge and he'd be climbing the walls and screaming like an animal. Just as long as he does it after he's paid his cheque and driven off, she thought, please God don't let it be before that. Let me just earn my tip and wave them goodbye, I don't need any crap today. "You want fries, baked or mash? Maybe a side order of onions?"

  "Fries and as many onions as you like, Amy," the stranger said, "and a couple of cold beers."

  She nodded and dashed away, happy to avoid any further conversation.

  "Let me tell you about reality, Hughie," the stranger said out of the blue. "I'll keep it simple so you can follow," he leaned back on the padded seat, letting himself spread out. "Reality is layers," he continued, "
infinite
layers. Piled on top of one another." He mimed this with his hands, spread out flat over the table, moving them one over the other. It made Hughie think of standing in the yard at school, playing the counting-out game in a circle
Pizza pizza pizza pie, if you eat it you will die…

  "Universe over universe, existence after existence," the stranger said, "all stacked up."

  Amy returned with their beers, the stranger taking a long draught of his before continuing. "Some people never see beyond their own little layer."

  "The ants," Hughie muttered, thinking of the stranger's analogy about the ants and the bottle.

  "The ants,
exactly
," the stranger smiled, "you're getting it. Some of us see the whole, even move between the layers, exploring, researching, playing…"

  He took another mouthful of beer. "Actually my lot didn't do much playing, they took existence far too seriously."

  "Republicans, huh?" Hughie asked, pushing himself into the corner of his booth and taking a drink of his own beer.

  The stranger paused, looked into Hughie's mind for an explanation and then grinned. "Something like that."

  The Eagles switched to Creedence Clearwater Revival. "I see the bad moon arising, I see trouble on the way, I see earthquakes and lightning, I see bad times today…" Damn right, thought Hughie,
damn
right.

  "Usually those layers are solid," the stranger said, "it takes a lot of effort and skill to pass between them." He frowned, that persistently light and jolly mood punctured by a sharp and unnerving anger. "A skill I seem to lack these days. Taken away by them…" he ground his fingernail into the soft wood of the dining table. "I am a reduced man, Hughie," he said quietly, "you are not seeing me at my best…"

  That's a small relief, Hughie thought, for he was quite certain that a stronger creature than he saw before him would not be in the best interests of his species. If the stranger picked up on the thought he didn't show it, just went on defacing the wood. After a moment, Hughie realised that he found this edgy creature even more unnerving than usual so tried to jog him out of it. "Usually?" he prompted.

  The stranger looked up at him and, just for a second, Hughie saw the irises of his eyes–
its
eyes Hughie, a voice said in his head, not
his
never forget that– no, he wouldn't… he saw the irises of
its
eyes bleed into the white, as if the dye was running. The colour rippled, offering a serrated edge like a circular saw. Then the image was gone, the eyes looking as human as ever. "Usually?" the stranger asked.

  "You said that the layers were
usually
solid, suggesting they weren't always."

  The stranger smiled, the anger gone instantly – no, Hughie that voice said again, don't believe that, the anger is
always
there, just under the surface, just waiting to boil over – "That's right," the stranger said, "
usually
… " he brushed away the shavings of varnish and wood he had dug from the table as if just noticing a fleck of dust on an otherwise perfect surface. "Sometimes, there are soft points, thin areas where the layers bleed into one another. These places are focal points for disturbances in the overall reality, areas where time slips loose or the atmosphere curdles. They disturb those around them, warp the normal rules of that layer's physics. In short, Hughie, they are areas of potential."

  "And the Home Town site is one of them?"

  The stranger nodded. "You really were wasted pumping shit, Hughie."

  "Tell me something I don't know," Hughie replied.

  "Alright," though whether the stranger had misunderstood or was just playing with him, Hughie couldn't tell, "someone who knew what he was doing in an area like that could rip a hole through the layers as deeply as he liked," he looked into Hughie's head, searching for a suitable analogy, "like knocking a hole in the wall of one subway tunnel and into another."

  "Wouldn't that damage the layers?" Hughie asked, though in his head the word he was thinking of wasn't "layers", the word was "world".

  "Oh naturally," the stranger replied, "it would tear the metaphorical guts right out of it." He glanced over to the bar. "I wonder where the lovely Amy's gone with our steaks…"

 

 

Sally Hillman had never known a day like it. She was used to her employer's comings and goings – in fact, as Tom had predicted when arriving at the Plaza hotel, she had an intimate knowledge of both, for Ted Loomis the former was swift and the latter swifter still – but she had never known him vanish off the face of the earth like he had today. The phone had been ringing itself silly with some kind of fuss over at the Home Town site. The police, no less, demanding to know where Loomis might be. She had come close to grabbing her purse and hightailing it out of the office of Loomis Real Estate several times over the last hour.

  She had tried Loomis' home line every ten minutes or so but – unless he was lying dead somewhere, dear Christ, Sally thought, don't say his heart finally gave in – there was nobody there.

  Her head filled with the worst possible images: her employer (and occasional lover) growing grey and cold on the bathroom tiles; her being marched off to prison as an accessory to some form of crooked business deal she had no knowledge of; SWAT teams swinging through the smoked glass window of the office, machine guns locked and loaded… When the phone rang again it was almost a relief.

  "Loomis Real Estate," she answered, "Ted, is that you?"

  "I'm afraid not dear lady," came the voice on the other end of the line, "in fact it was the noble Mr Loomis I was hoping to speak to."

  "He's not here," she said, sick to death of having to. "Nobody's seen him since he left the office yesterday."

  "Oh," said the man, "I've seen him since then, in fact my friend and I shared a couple of drinks with him last night. I confess I was rather the worse for wear after the experience, perhaps he too is suffering somewhere."

  This last mirrored Sally's imaginings a little too closely for comfort, though it wasn't drink she feared had struck him. "You were with him last night?" she asked.

  "Indeed, he was kind enough to tell us about the Home Town project and suggested we met him there this morning."

  Alarm bells began ringing in Sally's head, not that it took much to set them off given her current agitation. "Really?" she asked. "Were you able to catch him there?"

  "Sadly not," the man replied. "Not to worry, I'm sure we'll catch him soon enough."

  
Don't let him hang up!
Sally thought… whoever this guy is he's seen Ted after anyone else and was at the construction site this morning, she was damned sure the cops would want to ask him a few questions. "Wait!" she said, trying to bite down on the agitation, the last thing she wanted to do is scare the man off. "If you tell me where you're calling from I can hunt him down and get him to call you back."