Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (41 page)

“
He said the light was on ‘em, then it wasn’t. He couldn’t figure it out. Decided to track me down and ask me about it and got my address from the USLS.”

“
What do you think happened?” Laci asked.

They were coming up the road that would lead them around the cove and up to Frenchman’s Head. It was an access road, and Laci remembered the Sheriff taking her up it after last night’s excitement, taking her back to her car.

“
I don’t rightly know,” Caleb said slowly. “I’ve thought about it, though, and I’ve got kind of an idea.”

He took a long pull from the bottle, then capped it tightly and tossed it into the backseat of the car.

“
Imagine I’ve had about enough of that for the night,” he said. Then he went on.

“
I think those boys weren’t never meant for this world. It sounds strange, but it also sounds true. I think they found themselves here, for whatever reason, but they didn’t belong here and they realized it. Well, maybe once they figured out where they
was
supposed to be, they just…went there.”

“
You mean like another dimension or something?” Laci asked. She’d slowed the car down to ten MPH on the road and she could still feel it slipping in the mud. The rain was relentless. Lightning crashed overhead and the wind blew hard off the ocean. Impossible as it seemed, the storm was getting worse.

“
Maybe,” Caleb said. “Maybe not. I don’t rightly know
exactly
where they came from.
Hell
, maybe. Or maybe they’ve just been living in the past all these years. Time travelers, like you said. At any rate, I think they found a way to get back there, and that’s why they disappeared like that. It’s also why they just appeared suddenly on your camera, because they decided to come back. And I think I know why.”

“
You came home,” Laci said. Another flash of lightning illuminated the lighthouse some ways ahead of them. They were nearly there.

“
Exactly,” Caleb said. “They slipped away when they realized I wasn’t coming back to the lighthouse, but the day I make it back to Calamity Falls, they show up. Just lucky you was out here when they appeared, or I might not have known. Or maybe I would have, when I finally made it out to look at the old girl one last time.”

“
Why
did
you come back?” Laci asked. This conversation felt more like an interview, but she was too wrapped up in the story at this point to care.

“
I’m dying,” Caleb said, without a pause. “Or, I
will
die. I’ve got early-stage Alzheimer’s. I’m going to die, but I’m gonna be a mental baby first. I just wanted to say goodbye to my hometown again before I got too messed up to enjoy it.”

“
I’m so sorry,” Laci said.

“
Don’t be,” said Caleb. “I’m an old man now. That’s what old men do - we get old and we die. Except…I think my boys are here to take me with them when they go back to wherever it is they came from. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

Laci stopped the car. They were there, the lighthouse towering above them. She turned and met the old man’s eye.

“
Maybe we shouldn’t get out of the car,” she said. “Maybe we ought to just turn around and go back to town, let Sheriff Danton deal with this.”

“
No,” Caleb said. “I want to see them one more time before I go. They were scary as hell, my boys, but I
did
love them in my own way. Guess I want to show ‘em I’m man enough to come back and face ‘em after all that I done, after all the years that’ve passed.”

Laci looked at the man for a moment, then slowly nodded.

“
We’re going to need flashlights,” she said.

“
There’s a breaker inside. If the storm hasn’t wiped out all the power in town, I’ll turn on some lights,” Caleb replied. He opened the car door and stepped out into the blinding rain. Ahead of him, weathering the storm like a stone titan, the lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head…

…
suddenly blazed to life.

“
They’re here,” Caleb said, watching as the beam shot out from the top of the lighthouse, shooting out into the ocean. The rain caught it and gave it near-solid form, a tube of brilliance stretching out as far as the eye could see.

“
How do you know that?” Laci asked, pulling herself out from the back seat of the car. She stopped short, looked up and saw the light. Her face dropped.

“
Oh,” she said in a small voice. Then she held up the little flashlight she’d dug out of the camera bag. “I guess this is going to be useless in there.”

“
Keep it,” said Caleb, his eyes never leaving the roving beam of light. “Never know when you’re going to need a little extra light, even in a place like this.”

“
Got it,” Laci said.

Caleb turned to her.

“
You ready?” he asked.

“
No,” she replied, then smiled weakly. “I imagine you
can’t
be ready for something like this. But we’ve got to do it anyway.”

Caleb nodded and walked toward the door to the lighthouse, Laci falling in behind him. When they got to the entrance, she looked down at the padlock and sighed.

“
I don’t have anything in the car that can get us through that,” she said. “I thought maybe they would have left the door open for us.”

“
What, and risk having some stranger find them first?” Caleb asked. “My boys are smarter than that.”

“
So how are we going to get in?”

“
Simple,” Caleb said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He jangled them in Laci’s face.

“
How did you…” she began.

“
Honey, I used to work here, remember? I always kept a spare set on me, just in case.” He reached down and fit the key into the lock.

“
But they never changed the lock in all those years since you’ve been gone?” Laci asked. She watched him fiddle with the device, half-expecting the old key to fail.

The lock snapped open, and Caleb smiled.

“
Why would they?” he asked, pushing open the door.

“
Good point,” Laci said.

The pair stepped out of the howling storm, and back in time.

“
It looks like nobody’s been here since last season,” Caleb said. “Jesus - it looks like it did when I left.”

They stood in a small round room with a desk and fold-down bed. There was a little bookshelf, some sea charts and old green beer bottles lining its ranks. The walls were lined with paintings of ships and the ocean. Everything was covered with a thin layer of dust. They could hear, two stories above them, the groaning machinery of the lantern, grumbling its displeasure at having been woken up so early in the year.

Along the far wall was a simple iron ladder that ran up to the next level. The ladder ended at a trap door in the ceiling.

“
Up?” Laci asked.

Caleb nodded. “It’s the only direction to go in a lighthouse.”

The pair shuffled over to the ladder, dripping rainwater onto the dusty floor, and then Caleb rubbed his hands together and gripped the ladder. He climbed up to the portal in the ceiling - it was heavy and rusted and didn’t give easily. Laci was amazed at how well the old man still navigated. She’d known plenty of men half his age who couldn’t bounce up a ladder like that. His movement spoke volumes about how long he’d worked in this place.

Finally the door gave with a groan and a shower of rust particles, and Caleb disappeared through the hole in the ceiling. Laci followed. Halfway up, though, she had to stop. A spear of pain lanced through her head, causing her knees to buckle. She gasped. Squeezing her eyes shut, she laced her hands through a rung on the ladder and waited for the agony to subside.

“
You alright down there?” Caleb asked from above, peering down through the trap. “You don’t look so good.”

“
Fine,” Laci said, her eyes pressed shut. When she opened them, her vision was blurry. She could barely make out the white face of Caleb above her.

“
It’s a side effect of the tumor,” she said. “The treatment was…unique. I’m the experiment that worked.”

Caleb looked at her quizzically.

Laci smiled.

“
It was the size of a pool ball, and it had invaded my entire limbic system. The doctors gave me a zero percent chance of being alive in six months.” The pain finally receding, she began to climb again. “So when these surgeons in San Diego approached me about an experimental procedure, I said ‘why not?’. The only place I was going was to an early grave.”

“
And it worked,” said Caleb. “That’s amazing.”

“
Yeah, well,” Laci said. She reached the top of the ladder and pulled herself into the next room. “They used pulses of radiation and a vacuum to get rid of the tumor. Some special laser thing they’d been working on, wanted a willing guinea pig. They said there was probably only a five percent chance that it would work. I died four times on the operating table, but they managed to revive me each time, and kept going. Something to do with Tachyons. You know, particles that travel backward through time? Well, they said it reduced the tumor in size by moving it backward along its growth line or something, and when it was small enough to manage they were able to burn it out of my head. Pretty much right outta
Star Trek
or something.”

“
Incredible,” Caleb said. He looked at Laci with no small measure of awe.

“
So now I have a hole in my brain and it gives me these terrific headaches. A nice scar behind my ear, too. I spent six months in rehab, learning how to speak and walk again.” She paused for a moment, trying to focus in the dim light given off by the small, dirty light bulbs on the walls around them. “What is this place?”

“
Storage room,” Caleb said, looking around at the boxes surrounding them. There were crates of lenses, bulbs, mechanical equipment, all bearing the stamp of the USLS. “Do you need to rest? I imagine we can stop here for a while.”

“
No, I’ll be fine,” Laci said. “It comes and goes in waves. The doctors said it might take years to fully recover—it’s like my brain’s been rewired.”

“
Sounds like a lot of work ahead of you,” Caleb said, his face solemn. He pointed to another ladder, a smaller one, against the wall.

“
That one’s gonna take us up into the lantern room. If they’re not up there, they’ll be out on the railing. You sure you’re ready to do this? I don’t know what’s gonna happen when we see them.”

“
I’m ready, Caleb,” she said. “Really, I’m fine. If I can die four times and come back, I’m sure I can handle whatever your sons throw at us.”

Caleb nodded and walked to the base of the ladder. He stopped suddenly, staring intently at the little trap door above him.

“
What is it?” Laci asked.

“
It’s nuthin’,” Caleb said. “Just that I haven’t been up here since Sally died.”

“
You all right to go on?” she asked, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Like I said, we could just turn around and go home. Let the Sheriff take care of it.”

“
No, I’ll be fine,” Caleb said. He patted her hand, then stepped onto the ladder. Laci followed close behind.

Outside, the wind howled in rage as the sea pummeled the shoreline. Lightning struck like artillery up and down the coast as the front moved inland, bringing armies of rain to the defenseless shore. It was going to get much worse before it got any better.

The lantern room was only twenty feet across, much smaller than the rooms below it. The immensity of the lamp mechanism in the center of the chamber made the size deceptive - in reality, there was only five feet or so on either side of the massive rotating contraption.

Half the room was walled with large glass panes while the other half was stone, like the rest of the building. The beam of screamingly bright light spun slowly on its axis, clockwise across the horizon, letting ships know exactly where the shoreline was.

Caleb crawled into the room, then offered a hand to Laci.

“
Make sure you don’t look into the lantern, whatever you do,” he said. “The light’s bright enough to burn the eyes outta your head.”

Laci climbed into the room with Caleb’s help, then squinted her eyes as the beam of light went by. Even with her eyes clamped shut, the lantern washed her eyelids with white hot light, sending pain through the side of her head. She grabbed for her skull, then stopped.

A sound floated across the threshold of pain, a soft dry sound.

Chittering.

“
Jed? Jerry?” Caleb called, swinging around. “It’s me, boys. Poppa’s come back.”

The chittering grew louder on the opposite side of the lamp mechanism, near the front of the lighthouse. Now that she could see again, Laci saw the small door that led out onto the balcony.

Caleb stepped around the side of the lantern.

“
Boys?” he asked again, cautiously. The chittering noise stopped. All they could hear was the steady, monstrous
THRUM…THRUM…THRUM
of the lantern machinery. It came around again, and Laci turned her head away.

THRUM…THRUM…THRUM…

Caleb disappeared around the side of the light, leaving Laci alone. The shadows up here, such as they were, were in constant motion due to the shifting light source. It was difficult to judge where
anything
was.