Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (39 page)

“
Thank you,” she said, and motioned toward the chair next to the bed. Then she laughed.

“
Something funny?” he asked, his smile slipping. She could see his teeth white and strong - dentures, probably.

“
Oh, I was just going to ask you if you wanted something to drink,” she said. “Forgot I wasn’t home. All I can offer you is water.”

“
Never drink the stuff,” he said somberly. “Takes years off your life.”

Instantly, the smile returned to his face.

“
All right, then,” she said, dropping to sit on the side of the bed, looking at her guest. “What can I do for you, Mr. Mears?”

“
Caleb,” he said. “You can call me Caleb, if you want.”

“
Caleb, then,” she said. “You said you had some questions?”

“
Yep,” he said. “Just a few. But the most important one is—can I look at those pictures you took yesterday? They ran one of ‘em on the news last night, but it was only on the TV for a second, and when the paper came out this morning they only had a picture of the boys being taken away in the ambulance.
I’d
…I’d like to see those boys, if I may.”

Laci sat there motionless for a moment, then nodded her head. “I suppose that’d be okay,” she said, leaning over and reaching for the Canon. “Mind if I ask why you’re so interested?”

“
If I could just look at them for a minute,” he said, “I’ll tell you the whole story. I promise—on my honor.”

“
All right,” she said, bemused. “Here, lean over a little so you can see the screen.” He complied, and she could smell the old man’s cologne - something cheap and manly, something a grandchild would give him for Christmas, maybe. Old Spice.

“
These are all just shots of the lighthouse from that little forest down by the viewpoint…”

“
Right above Corpse Cove,” murmured the old man. “I know exactly where you were.”

“
Corpse Cove?” she asked. “It’s not called that on the map.”

“
Bodies used to wash up there,” he said. “Every time a ship wrecked, you’d get half the dead sailors washed up on the beach a few days later. The ones the sharks didn’t get, that is. And, no. The official name is Beaulieu’s Cove, named after the same French fellow the cape is. Nice pictures, by the way—pretty enough to be in a book.”

“
I’ve had my stuff in books,” she murmured, clicking the finder forward. “But not this kind of stuff.”

“
You a,
whaddyacallit
, photojournalist?” he asked.

“
I take pictures of auras and spirits,” she said. She used to be self-conscious when she told people what she did, but she eventually grew a shell. Mostly, people just nodded and changed the subject, or asked asinine questions, but occasionally she got sarcasm or hostility. None of that mattered anymore, though—after all the suffering she’d been through, she could handle idiocy from the Philistines.

But Caleb just nodded, intently peering at the view screen. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

She was going to ask him what he meant, but then they got to the money shot, and he gasped and stiffened beside her. Alarmed, she whipped her head around, fearing that the old man was suffering a heart attack next to her, and what she saw didn’t comfort her at all - Caleb had gone completely pale, his black eyes were open so wide she could see the little veins on their sides, and he shook silently.

“
Mr. Mears?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

“
My Lord,” he breathed, and she sensed those two words were more prayer than ejaculation. “They’ve come back.”

“
Who?” she asked, fear warring with excitement in her brain. Whatever was coming, whatever had come with the storm, was going to reveal itself to her. She knew it as surely as she knew that she was meant to be here right now, in a cheap room at the Motel 6 next to this old lighthouse keeper. “Who’s come back?”

“
My sons,” he whispered, and tears began to roll down that ancient face.

“
My first wife’s name was Sarah,” he said after they’d ordered down for whiskey and soda, “but everyone called her Sally. I married her before I went off to Europe in forty-three, and when I got back we bumped around Oregon for a while before we decided to settle back on the coast. They were lighting the lighthouses up again - you know a Japanese sub got all the way over here, once? Happened in ‘42, and the Lighthouse Service shut ‘em all off for the duration of the war, but in ‘45 they needed families to run the things again, and there I was, looking for work.” He smiled. “It was a dream, young lady. We had a nice little house, plenty of privacy, and it wasn’t too far to town in case Sally wanted to shop or something. And every nine months or so, the USLS would drop off another tank full of coal oil and boxes of books for us to read.”

“
Sounds…maybe a little boring?” said Laci.

“
Sometimes it was,” said Mears. “Sometimes it was indeed. But we were young and in love, and Sally and I weren’t really all that sociable a couple, anyway. It’s why we were vagabonding around in the first place. I got my fill of people during the war in Italy—don’t like being too close to anyone, you know? Foxholes and such…”

His voice trailed off, and he closed his eyes momentarily, lost in memory. But he soon reopened them and looked again at the picture on the view screen, the twins standing there in the gloom, their hair whipped by the wind and rain.

“
And Sally came from a big
Eye
-talian family up in Portland, and they had about a thousand kids, you know? She loved the idea of having her own bathroom, having her own clothes without having three older sisters wearing ‘em first. It was a stroke of luck, this job was.”

“
And you had kids?” Laci prompted.

“
And
we had two sons,” he said quietly, nodding as he looked at the camera. “We didn’t know we was having twins when she caught pregnant, nor during the pregnancy itself. Sally was huge, all right, but what did we know? Tom Foster came out from town every month or so, make sure Sally was eating enough, check her blood and such, but they didn’t have them ultrasounds or anything back then, and Doc Foster was a bit of a drunk anyway, so we never knew. Not ‘til they came, anyway…”

“
The twins,” said Laci. “The boys on the balcony.”

“
We never let ‘em up there,” said Mears. “Too dangerous. The house is only about fifty feet tall, but the winds you get up there will whip you right off, you’re not careful. And Jed and Jerry weren’t all that coordinated sometimes.”

“
Those are their names?” she asked softly. She was enrapt in the tale, and her questions were all lubricant for the story, meant to oil it along. It was working, too.

“
Jedidiah and Jeremiah,” he said. “Lucky they have names at all, you know. I ended up delivering ‘em myself—they came a few weeks early, and we couldn’t get to town for the birth. I had an old Packard, and it wouldn’t run half the time without you took apart the whole engine and put it back together, and when the twins came it was dead on the drive, so there we were. There was a storm going, just like there is right now, and they hadn’t electrified all the way out to Frenchman’s head, so we were in the dark, there in the Keeper’s house.” He stopped for a second, and wiped his eyes.

“
You know, I’d fought at Monte Cassino and Rome in the Big One, I’d had a ship torpedoed from under me and had to swim for six hours to get to land. But that night—well, it was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. Sally—poor, beautiful Sally—had a hell of a time with the birth. She was a small woman, and we were both little more than kids, you know? We didn’t know what we was doing at all, and when Jed’s head came out, I was so scared I think I would’ve rather faced a whole squadron of Krauts right at that moment.”

A knock came on the door. Laci took a second to come out of her entranced state, gave Mears an apologetic look and stood.

“
You wanted room service?” asked the man at the door, his look signaling what he thought of customers who wanted whiskey at ten in the morning. Laci ignored him, signed for the booze and shut the door.

“
Soda?” she asked Mears.

“
No thank you, ma’am,” he said. “If you’re gonna drink good whiskey, I see no point in watering it down.”

“
How about if you throw up easily?” she asked, moving to the bathroom to get the plastic cup that was there.

“
Then maybe you shouldn’t be drinking at all,” he said, standing to join her as she unwrapped the sanitary protection on the glass. “I appreciate the whiskey, and you letting me look at the pictures, Miss Powell. You don’t need to drink with me.”

“
I’m alive right now when I should be dead, Mr. Mears,” she said, setting the cup down so that she could unscrew the cap on the Maker’s Mark (a forty-dollar extra on the police department’s hotel room tab). She poured herself a couple of fingers, handed the bottle to Caleb and opened the soda water. “I’m not going to worry about what I should and shouldn’t do anymore.”

He looked at her curiously. “You’ve got a story, too, don’t you?”

“
A boring one,” she said, pouring club soda into her drink. “Cancer’s not nearly as exciting as delivering conjoined twins in the dark in a rainstorm.”

“
Exciting,” he snorted. “Yeah, it was exciting, all right. You got a glass for me?”

“
Just take the bottle,” Laci said. “What I’ve got should do me fine.”

He shrugged and lifted the bottle to his lips, drank. He swallowed, the Adam’s apple on his neck jiggling as the fiery liquid went down, set the whiskey on the bed table and sighed contentedly.

“
I almost killed them right then,” he said.

Laci looked at him.

“
I stood there in the flickering candlelight, looking at Sally, who was near unconscious by then, been ripped apart and was bleeding so strongly that I thought I’d never be able to stop the flow. And in my hands, covered with blood and slime, I had…I had this thing, this freakish spidery-looking tangle of limbs and heads and squalling screams, and my first impulse was to take them and throw them as hard as I could against the wall. You believe that?”

Laci took a long pull of her drink and didn’t speak. She moved past Mears, back to the bed, and sat down. He stayed in the doorway of the bathroom, looking at her with his black eyes. Finally, she answered.

“
I think that’s natural,” she said. “Last night, when I saw them up there on the lighthouse, saw them staring down at me, I wanted to…I wanted them to be gone. I didn’t want them to exist. They scare me, Mr. Mears, and even though they’re at the hospital right now, they scare me still. And I don’t know why.”

“
They went to that hospital before,” he said. “After Sally killed herself.”

Laci looked up at him.

“
They were nine, just like they are in those pictures you showed me,” he said. “We kept them at the lighthouse because people were scared of ‘em, and because they were
odd
.” He used the word carefully, as if he’d said it before a million times in reference to his sons. “They didn’t talk much. Not to us, anyway. When they were alone, and they thought we couldn’t hear ‘em, they’d chitter like jaybirds in a cornfield - but as soon as they saw their mother or I coming, they’d clam up again. And you know what? It was scary, Miss Powell. Those children scared the living Jesus out of me. And Sally felt the same way—we’d be in our room at the Keeper’s house, and the twins were in the next room over, and it would be pitch black. I’d be lying there next to my wife, both of us awake though it was the middle of the night, neither of us saying a word but both of us knowing we were still conscious. And the boys never cried, never screamed, were always perfectly quiet throughout the night…

“
Except sometimes, every few nights, they’d make a noise.”

“
What noise?” asked Laci, gripping the plastic cup in her palms so tightly the material was bent.

“
A scrabbling noise,” said Mears. “A noise like they was slowly, carefully crawling out of their crib in the middle of the night. A noise like one of them maybe slipped a little on the way down to the floor, had to grab for one of the slats real quick, and then it would be silent—me and Sally lying still and quiet in our bed, Sally crying without making any noise, and Jed and Jerry hanging there in the blackness, waiting to see if I’d get up, light a lantern and come see what they were doing. Sometimes, that stillness would go on for hours.”

“
Did you ever go check?” Laci asked.

“
No,” whispered Mears. “No, I never did. But I thought about it all the time. I’d be in the lantern room, changing the wick, and that image would come to me. And I’m sure Sally thought about it, too—she’d be back in the house with the boys, feeding ‘em, changing ‘em, watching ‘em grow up into what you saw last night—and they never talked to her. Never told her they loved her. When they got old enough, they’d start to just disappear, go rambling in the woods for hours, come back all burrs and smudges and skinned knees, never say a word.

“
Once, they disappeared all day. I got back to the house, Sally was frantic. She hadn’t seen them since breakfast, and she was about ready to bust a gut, she was so incoherent and terrified.

“
Well, we went looking, and guess where we found them?”

Laci was startled. As if she would know…

But she did. Somehow, she did.