The Curiosity Killers (10 page)

~

On Cob’s way back to the lab, he passed a sitting room whose doors were open before but were now firmly shut. They were pocket doors, well worn from centuries of sliding in and out of the walls. Though they were latched together at their center point, a sliver of light fell across the hallway floorboards. Every few seconds, laughter erupted through that thin gap.

Cob held his breath and tiptoed forward to peek.

There was the woman, now out of her mechanic’s uniform, sitting in front of a roaring fire telling the others a story. A cat was silhouetted sitting near her on the carpet, looking up at her as if paying attention to her words. The woman’s eyes flashed with eagerness and excitement, and her gestures were grand and demonstrative. When she stood to act out a part of her tale, Cob could see that she now wore a smart, practical pantsuit, not unlike the men-in-black attire he himself sported. An ID badge swung from her left lapel, but with her back to the fire, the light behind her, Cob couldn’t make out what it said.

“And then he was gone, parachute and everything,” the woman said. Her audience erupted in wild applause.

“I can’t believe it,” Miss Moto said. Cob now saw that she was reclining on the floor in what appeared to be a very uncomfortably complicated posture. “Seriously, that is the last person I would have suspected.”

“I know,” the other woman agreed.

Someone was shuffling toward the pocket doors, and Cob scooted out of sight and down the corridor toward the kitchen. He didn’t look back but instead hurried straight down to the lab as he was originally supposed to.

He was gone…parachute…last person they would have suspected…

The woman’s ID badge was blue ink on a white field.

Cob had no further time to ponder these clues before Doctor Vere trundled down the stairs. “Ready to go find the Mothman, Mister Cob?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be, doc.”

“Have a seat there.” Vere nodded toward a round metal stool. He picked up a flat clear object with a pair of tweezers. “Hold out your left palm.”

Cob obliged. “Is this the retrieval device?”

“Yes,” Vere replied. “This might hurt a bit.” He set the object on Cob’s palm, and as soon as the material touched his skin it sank into it. A sharp, liquid feeling shot through Cob’s veins, followed by a twinge and cramping in his hand. He gasped and made a fist against the pain, but Vere grabbed his hand and held it open.

“It’ll just be a second, son. You can get through it. If you close your hand around it, the button might migrate too deep into your tissue. That makes it hard to activate in an emergency.” Vere held Cob’s fingers together and placed his other hand on Cob’s shoulder. “It’s all right. I know it’s quite unpleasant.”

The pain sharpened. “Gah!” Cob clamped his mouth shut, fearing he’d cry if he let himself. “Hoo, man. That is…wow.” Unbidden, little tears trickled out from the corners of both eyes. “Damn, doc, that sucks a
lot
.” The pain lessened, and Cob could see his skin was smooth and unbroken. No one would have guessed that something just slid through it. A moment later, Cob felt fine once again.

“Flex it a bit,” Vere instructed.

Cob obliged. The hand moved freely, but he could feel a knot under his skin, as if he’d suffered a minor sprain.

“Is it numb?” Vere asked.

“A little.”

“That will subside even more over the next few hours,” Vere said. “Now, I need you to press the center of your palm…”

Cob did so, and a small device on Vere’s table vibrated.

“Very good, son,” Vere said, picking up the device. He pressed a button on it. “Look at your hand, then.”

On Cob’s palm, there was now a faint red X.

“When you see that, you want to search for the same marking in your surroundings,” Vere instructed. “It will be roughly the same spot where you arrived, though it may be slightly off if there is something blocking the original spot, or if the climate is too damp to allow the necessary electricity to flow. The system will locate the nearest usable location. If you wind up off a bit, you’ll return—” Vere gestured around the room. “Well, you might not return right on the drive plate, but rather somewhere else within the building.”

Cob chuckled. “Anybody ever land on the roof?”

Vere gave Cob a stern look. “We expect you within the time frame we discussed,” Vere said. “So. Any other questions?”

“I can’t interfere, right?”

“No. So this is not the time to think about preventing the Silver Bridge from collapsing, Mister Cob. Unfortunately, those poor souls are gone, and there’s nothing to be done without causing tremendous paradoxes.”

Cob shrugged. “I mean, it sucks, I’m not saying I love that that happened or anything, but that’s not what I’m going back there for.”

“You want to know what the creature was, the cryptid that seemed to portend the accident,” Vere said.

“Yup,” Cob said. “It could be an alien, it could be a kid playing a prank…”

“You realize the going theory is a barn owl or a sand hill crane, do you not?”

“No matter what, I just gotta know.”

“You are one of our most frequent clients,” Vere said, “so yes, I am well acquainted with your insatiable need to know various things.” Vere snapped his fingers and scurried to a desk across the room. “Almost forgot.” He withdrew a small cloth bag from a drawer, scrabbled around inside for a moment, and then produced a money clip with a small clutch of cash in it. “Era-appropriate currency,” Vere said. “Try not to spend it if you can help it. Emergencies only. It’s antique. We’re starting to run out.” Vere handed the money to Cob, who shoved it into his right front trouser pocket.

Vere pointed to a low metal platform in the corner of the lab. “On you go.”

Cob wondered again. The murder flickering in his memory…what were these other things he’d come here to learn?

“Doc, is there any way I could ever…uh…”

“Mister Cob, we’re on a very tight schedule here.” Vere was glaring at him. “Get on the plate, sir. I won’t ask again.”

Cob nodded.

Later
.
I can figure it out later. Maybe offer ’em lots of coin when I get back if they’d let me keep one memory. Just one. If this ends up being a good one, I’d rather keep this than the blood and terror and pain and stuff.

The murderer had worn pinstripe trousers held up with suspenders, underneath which he’d had just a blood-smeared tank top that had once been white. He had slicked-back hair and crazy eyes…the apartment was abandoned; it hadn’t been hers, Cob knew somehow. No, Elizabeth lived—

There was that name again. Elizabeth.
Who was Elizabeth?

Elizabeth lived with…friends? In—

“I’m rooming near the Florentine Gardens.” The voice was musical, low and husky with a kind of lilting quality to it. Cigarette smoke swirled around her black hair. “Do you know it? The owner…he’s kind of a creep, but he lets me stay at his joint for practically nothing.”

Cob dragged his attention back to the present.

Focus
.
You can worry about that later. If the memories come back, you got plenty of time to worry about them then. You got other stuff to do now.

“Bon voyage, Mister Cob,” Vere said. “See you soon.”

Cob gave Vere a little salute. His hand exploded in pain again, and he doubled over. His vision swam. One second he was staring at the scratched metal of the time machine’s drive plate, and the next everything went black.

Sunday, November 27, 1966, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA

“Mister? You all right?” Someone shook Cob.

He coughed and blinked up into the brown eyes of a small boy. The boy relaxed and let go of Cob.

“Thank God,” the boy said. He wasn’t quite a teenager and had the scrawny, underfed look of a kid on the brink of a growth spurt. He wore a tee shirt with contrasting piping along the collar and sleeves and a ball cap with a cartoon of a knight’s silver helmet on it. “You need me to call the doctor? I think he’s havin’ his lunch just in the coffee shop there.” The boy pointed across the intersection at a cheery brick building. In the window, carefully painted red letters spelled out JOHN’S DINER.

“Nah, I’m okay.” Cob flexed his hand; the cramping and pain were gone. He took a long, deep breath.

The air smelled oily, hot, and full of sharp tar.

EPA doesn’t exist yet.
Car emissions not so good. People are probably smoking everywhere.

The crumpled butts on the sidewalks confirmed part of that. His eyes watered, and the sun shone bright, right overhead. He pulled the Ray Bans out of his pocket. “Thanks, kid. I owe ya.” He got to his feet and fished around in his pocket. Vere hadn’t given him any coins, so a dollar would have to do. “Here, buy yourself a…malted? Is that what you guys like these days?”

The boy regarded the dollar with awe. “Wow, sir, I could get about three of ’em with this. Thanks.” He snatched the bill from Cob’s hand and hurried off to a bicycle lying on the corner.

Cars flanked both sides of the street, all late 1950s and early 1960s models of various mid- and low-priced varieties. No imports, nothing brand new.

Cob mused over the kid’s hat for a moment until he spotted a sign in one of the storefront windows. He walked closer. The hardware store was closed, which meant it must be Sunday based on the hours listed on the door. A blue and white mimeographed flyer proclaimed that AT DUNMORE’S HARDWARE, WE’RE CHEERING ON THE KNIGHTS AND YOU SHOULD TOO! There was the same cartoon knight helmet, beneath which were the dates of the regional football playoffs in nearby Ravenswood. WATCH THE KNIGHTS FLATTEN THE DEVILS!

Cob grinned. Sports used to be important in little towns like this. This was a time Cob only knew from history books and the ramblings of his great-grandmother Annie; she’d recorded a vlog in her youth that he’d watched growing up. Annie’s high school days weren’t much earlier than this.

“Time was people didn’t talk politics.”

Cob remembered from one of her videos; he remembered that she’d had his same dark hair, cherub face, and blue eyes.

“I never cared what others thought, so long as they were kind about it.”

He walked a little farther and found almost no businesses open but similar signs advertising the football game. He passed a record store, a pet shop with eager puppies bouncing in a pen in the front window—Cob entertained a dark thought that all the dogs were now long dead—and a shoe repair shop, the counter piled high with ladies’ pumps. Every person he passed tipped his hat or nodded at him, and Cob again remembered Grandma Annie’s stories of the mid-twentieth century.

“It only got worse later, the divisiveness. That’s the thing this war and its aftermath have managed to get right, since Empiricists are so much nicer to each other at least.”

Cob wound his way back to the corner he’d first awoken on, the corner near the coffee shop. Good a place to start as any.

You’re not here for nostalgia
.

Cob crossed the street to John’s Diner.

You’re here to find a monster.

~

The interior of the diner was dingier than Cob imagined. Inside, he found a checkerboard floor, smoky air, and Paul Simon on the jukebox plaintively insisting that a rock feels no pain.

Three men sat at the counter—two were heavyset, and all had a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Pie slices in various states of consumption sat on white plates in front of each of them. A willowy waitress—no uniform, just a plaid shirt with fringed pockets and a nametag reading “Peggy”—looked up when the bell on the door jingled.

“Anywhere you like.” Her voice was husky and her smile gentle. Her dark blond hair fell in soft curls down past her shoulders. On a black-and-white TV behind her, cardboard UFOs sailed in front of a painted sky.

Cob smiled. He wanted to do more than smile, because Peggy’s big light eyes and full mouth reminded him of the woman he’d grown infatuated with at the travel agency.

Oh, hell, who was he kidding? She was a
woman
, and women piqued his interest, period. She was a woman in a roomful of men who likely also saw something appealing in her gently world-weary look and tall, slim figure, so Cob figured he was just another poor sap being pulled into her fan club.

Besides, he reminded himself, getting up to funny business back in the past was the best way to fuck things up.

Don’t accidentally become your own grandpa and all that jazz.

Cob plunked himself down at the counter, a few stools away from the other men. Close enough to hear their conversations, but far enough to go unnoticed.

“Think they’ll take it?” one man—white-haired and bearded—asked another.

“Hell, no—’scuse me, Miss Peggy—but the team ain’t been worth a lick since Shad Williams graduated.”

The first man chuckled. “The Williams boy graduated back in sixty-four.”

“And that’s the last time they were any good,” the second man replied. He was younger, perhaps in his forties, with short curly hair and a beakish nose. Something about him looked familiar to Cob.

Was he one of the guys who saw it? Did I see his picture in one of the books I read for research?

A man to the left of Beak Nose took a long drag on his cigarette. “You passin’ through town?” he asked, eyes narrowed on Cob. He was younger than the first man, older than the second, with steel-gray hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. “Don’t think I seen you ’round here ’fore.”

“Oh, leave a man in peace, Clement,” Peggy said. She came over to Cob’s side of the counter. “What can I get ya? Got some nice fruit pie these boys are too unrefined to try. Coffee’s fresh, too.”

“Pie sounds fine, ma’am,” Cob replied, trying to affect the hint of Southern accent he heard in the other men’s voices. “And I’ll take some of that coffee, too.”

Peggy slid a black plastic ashtray and a set of silverware wrapped in a paper napkin at him. “Back in a jiff.” She disappeared through the batwing doors separating the kitchen from the counter.

“Clement, you know what they say ’bout curiosity and cats,” Beak Nose said. He turned to Cob. “Gotta apologize for him, sir. My older brother’s a rude one. You’d think we was raised in a barn.”

“You was, Bob,” Clement muttered. “He ain’t my brother. He’s my
step
-brother, and that step’s a steep one.”

The white-haired man laughed. “Will you two cease? Heaven’s sake, this boy will think everybody in Point Pleasant’s got a terrible sense of humor.”

Cob couldn’t help but join in the white-haired man’s laughter. “Nah, I suspect that isn’t so,” he replied.

“So you don’t
know
,” Clement said, chuckling. “Ain’t from here. You a salesman?”

This was what he’d been dreading. The cover story seemed flimsy. He didn’t want to use it, but it was in the instructions:
Do not deviate from historical accuracy. Stick to the plan. Don’t make the details too hard to remember, but don’t divulge details about your own life, the future, or the agency.