The Curiosity Killers (12 page)

That creep. The club owner. Elizabeth shouldn’t be renting a room from him. No good would come of it. But why was that? Cob knew it had something to do with who she was, why he knew her even before he knew her, why her name and voice and hair…

“Flower for the lady?” A young man sauntered up to their barstools with a basket of flowers, all sorts, the stems cut short. “She’d look lovely, all that dark hair, with a flower.”

“Oh, please, baby? I’d love that.” Elizabeth crushed out her cigarette and smiled at Cob. Off on the stage, the band laid into a new number, hotter than the last, and the kids got up for a try at the Lindy hop. Skirts swirled, shoes seemed to touch the very sky. Girls squealed as their partners tossed them over broad shoulders and between legs spread wide.

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

Cob woke up with a start. Already rattled, he screamed again when his eyes settled on the dead dog. Scooting away, he looked around, still feeling and seeing the old nightclub.

But this wasn’t 1947 Los Angeles. This was 1966 Point Pleasant. And there were monsters afoot.

How did I know where and when that was?
Cob shook his head, clearing cobwebs.
I thought of her before, back…Elizabeth…

No. It didn’t matter now. Now what mattered was—

There was something above him, something in the tree. Cob looked up and saw red pinpoints of light fixed on him. There was a screeching as of multiple owls, all crying in different tones at once.

“There you are,” Cob told the creature.

The wings spread once more and this time he saw it take flight, saw it scrunch up its enormous body like a spring coiling, then stretch out, arms forward.

It soared, glided, slid and cut across the air like it was nothing, like it wasn’t taller than the tallest man and heavier, certainly. It was an effortless thing, like swimming, floating. Just a few flaps of the wings were all it took to keep itself aloft.

“Christ, what a sight,” Cob muttered.

It didn’t jerk about like a moth, despite its nickname; it soared with beautiful effortlessness. He continued to stare until the thing got too close to the edge of the clearing. Not wanting to lose sight of it, he made chase, keeping his eyes pinned not on the land ahead but on the sky.

Even as he stared at the dark shape passing the face of the moon, the nightclub came back, a fuzzy overlay to the stars and the creature. He saw himself paying the flower man a nickel, saw the man then give Elizabeth her flower. It was pink with a cheery yellow center.

The flower floated over the moon, a pink orb over a silver one.

The Mothman dipped behind a copse of trees and was gone again. Cob cursed and looked around for the VW. “Shit shit shit.” It was too far back in the TNT area, which now almost seemed miles away. Cob was pretty quick for an amateur, but he couldn’t run two miles in less than ten minutes.

He looked back to the sky. The Mothman was gone, but the pink flower still hung there, as if projected onto a screen.

Elizabeth pressed the flower to her nose. “Dahlia,” she said, taking in its scent. “My favorite.”

Cob jogged again, shoving away the half-dreamed memories, pressing onward in the direction he thought the Mothman must’ve flown. But just as he thought he should be nearing a wooded area, the ground ahead was clear of trees and shrubbery, and the light was different, paler.

It was no longer late at night. It was dusk. And this was an open field.

He spun around, expecting to see the TNT area behind him, but instead it was more field.

Field, everywhere. Empty and open and green. Tidy. A few flowers sprinkled throughout. No trees. No shrubs.

But, overhead, a dozen Mothmen sailed through the air.

Tuesday, August 10, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

Ben flung his jacket at a startled Kris as he ran to the spiral stairs leading to the lab. “Get the medical kit!” he shouted. “Get water and a blanket!”

Vere’s call from the basement level came less than a minute earlier. The client was back, and he was in bad shape. The retrieval wasn’t due for another few hours. This was the second time Rupert Cob returned from a trip a little worse for wear, and now Ben was convinced Cob would be the first entry on the company’s “no more trips” list.

They’d always had an idea such a thing might be necessary. Injury was the usual thing they worried about, injury of body or mind or both, and of course a stunt like what Brimley Wheaton pulled would get you on a different sort of list you’d never get off of.

He was still rolling up his sleeves when he reached the bottom step. Vere stood there in his shabby lab coat and reading glasses doing something Ben never saw him do—comforting another human being.

“It’s all right, son. There, there. You’re perfectly intact. Do you want me to ask Miss Moto for some tea?” Vere’s low voice soothed like a midnight radio newscast from the continent.

Beside him, perched on the edge of a metal stool, was Cob. The client was still wearing the clothes they’d sent him off in, but they were disheveled and dirty. His necktie was gone, as was one shoe.

“Mister Cob, thank God.” Ben was at the client’s side, Kris flying down the stairs after him.

“Here.” Kris put down the first aid kit and wrapped Cob in a gray wool blanket. “Mister Cob, I’m just going to take some vitals, okay?” Kris took a few small instruments from the first aid kit, and a moment later she’d placed a thermometer beneath Cob’s tongue.

“What happened, son? What made you activate your return chip early?” Vere asked.

Cob shook his head. “They were everywhere. I…I don’t…” The young man blinked and frowned. “It’s all gone now,” he murmured. “I remembered…I remembered
everything
, but now it’s all gone. They…who? Someone made me come back.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, doc, I have no idea what happened.”

“You had to have pressed the chip,” Vere said. “You got to the retrieval site. You
wanted
to come back. No one could have made you come back.”

Ben looked at Vere until the older man returned his gaze. “We should let Kris tend to him, check his blood pressure and stuff,” Ben said, canting his head toward the stairs. “Help me get him some tea.”

Vere patted Cob on the shoulder. “Let Miss Moto know what you need, Mister Cob.” He followed Ben upstairs to the kitchen.

To Ben’s surprise, Vere filled up the teakettle once they were upstairs. “I didn’t think we were going to actually make him tea,” Ben remarked.

“Two birds,” Vere replied. “Besides, you promise a man a cup of tea and you return without one? Terrible and suspicious, don’t you think, Benoy?”

Ben opened a cupboard and took out a silver tea ball, a canister of loose-leaf chamomile, and a small cup. “How long after he escaped did the…the
cleaners
get to Wheaton?” he asked. He sifted a teaspoonful of tea into the bell and placed the bell in the cup.

“Not long,” Vere replied. He ignited the flame on one of the burners of the stove and set the kettle atop it. “Why? What are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure,” Ben said.

Vere adjusted the flame beneath the teakettle. It flared and whooshed, licking the edges of the silver metal.

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

The slender man emerged from the tunnel and quietly observed Rupert Cob chase the Mothman. Once the transfer to the Beta universe occurred, he got into the rented van and drove it to the motel.

A middle-aged woman met him at the front desk. “Did he go?” she asked.

The man nodded.

“Where is he now?”

“He’s still there.” When he spoke to the woman, he did so normally, no longer employing the time shift tricks he did to Cob to make it seem as if he were communicating telepathically. “I’ll send him back to his present in a bit, after I’ve had some dinner.”

The woman smiled. “The foods of this time are nuts, man. I could get you a Salisbury steak in a half an hour.”

“Oh, Miss Fallon,” the man said, “you are far too easily impressed. I have a bit of something upstairs.”

She nodded to the man, and he proceeded down the hall to the elevator.

Once inside his room, the man withdrew a microcassette recorder and spoke into it as he made a sandwich. “The interdimensional crossings work best with someone who’s time traveled before,” he said. “Subject W, whom I intercepted from Jonson’s set of
vacationers
—” At this word, the man paused in his food preparations. “This Subject RC proved to be the ideal candidate. It took almost nothing to send him to Beta.” He chuckled as he spread a thick line of jam on a slice of white bread. “I can only hope the creatures don’t decide he looks tasty.”

The man studied his knife. It was covered in crimson liquid. Claudio shivered as he licked it clean.

Part III: The Cleaners

We count our joys not by what we have, but by what kept us from that perfect thing. –Paul Laurence Dunbar

Tuesday, August 10, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

The signal reached Alison’s ear as she washed a dish. It was such a foreign sound, something she’d only trained for, that at first she didn’t remember what it was and feared she was having a stroke. As it went on, however, her preparations kicked in and she dropped the bowl and dishcloth into the sink and dashed across the room to her husband.

“Did you get it, too?”

He nodded and patted his jacket pocket.

“Is it loaded?” Alison pressed.

Her husband sighed and withdrew the pistol, checking its chamber. “Yes. Check in with Vere, and let’s go.”

Alison opened the left cupboard of the dining room buffet and took out a telephone. It was partly ancient, partly not, and powered up by turning a crank at the rear of the unit. She lifted the handset and pressed her thumb to a glossy panel where a rotary dial might have been a century and a half earlier.

“Doctor? We got the signal.” She listened for a moment. “Send his picture.” The glossy panel on the phone shifted to show a portly man with dark hair. Beneath the image was the name “Brimley Wheaton.” Alison placed her thumb over the man’s face, and a three-inch square piece of paper slid out of the bottom of the phone with the photograph printed on its surface. “Last seen?”

In the room behind her, Alison’s husband scurried about sliding switchblades into hidden recesses of his clothing. He then proceeded to withdraw Alison’s gun from its hiding place in the right cupboard of the buffet. As Alison listened to Doctor Vere’s instructions, she idly wondered when the last time she’d shot the thing was.

Back in Ohio. So long ago, yet not quite so long as it ought to have been.

The gun was an antique, not like her husband’s model, which was smuggled like new from Rénertia when Vere hired them to do this nasty bit of work. No, hers was far older, the dainty sidearm favored by a young woman long dead.

“Here, it’s a loan,” she’d told Alison as she looked at the two of them with tears welling up behind her spectacles. “Bring him back safely, miss.”

But she hadn’t. She’d brought him back unstuck in time, a ghost and now a hired killer.

“Did you get the target?” her husband asked.

Alison nodded and handed the photograph to Wilbur. “Let’s go.”

Alison took Katharine Wright’s gun from her and slipped it into the pocket of the clothes that felt like a strange costume to her. “We won’t be long,” she promised. “He’ll be home for dinner.” Hand in hand, Alison and Wilbur walked to the backyard of the Wrights’ house, the spot that seemed to glow as they neared it.

Alison felt her palm tingle. “Here,” she told Wilbur.

And then her insides roiled with nausea, pain racked her head, and then Alison and Wilbur were elsewhere, though not the elsewhere she’d hoped.

~

Brimley Wheaton wasn’t hard to find. He stood waiting in line at Hawthorne’s, a known RAA hangout, and the way he craned his neck around made Alison think he wasn’t sure who he was supposed to be meeting. She took advantage of his ignorance and sidled up to him, emitting a ladylike cough as she approached.

“You a friend of Monsieur Rénart?” she asked, invoking the underground RAA greeting. She peered up at him through her eyelashes and hoped the effect was charming, despite her discomfort at uttering the words.

Wheaton studied her. “I…what? Who are you?” He leaned over her. “Who sent you?”

It wasn’t working. Alison went straight for her backup plan and pressed the nose of her gun into his ribcage. “Who I am doesn’t matter.” She nodded behind her, where Wilbur waited at the car. He wore sunglasses, and the brim of his top hat was pulled down. “You’ll be joining my colleague over there.”

Wheaton moved, but Alison pushed the gun deeper into his side. He grunted. “You won’t be going for that crazy-ass weapon you got, man. Don’t even. Let’s not alarm these nice wannabe Rénartians by having me blast your guts all over their little coffee joint here, huh? There are kids present. I don’t like killing people around kids, even if those kids are assholes.”

I don’t like killing people at all
.
Vere’s never made me actually have to go through with it.

She felt nausea stronger than she’d felt in months, not since the last time she’d time traveled. If what they had to do didn’t work…would she—or Wilbur—have to actually kill this guy?

As Alison steered Wheaton outside, Wilbur opened the backseat of the hovercar and rustled him in. He slid next to Wheaton, and Alison took the driver’s seat. Behind her came the sound of small gears and then a metallic snap.

Wheaton let out a little whimper. “Those a bit tight?” Wilbur asked, his voice gruff. “It’s for your own protection.”

“How do you figure that?” Wheaton asked.

“If you fight back, we’ll have to kill you,” Alison snapped.

“Aren’t you going to kill me regardless?”

“Not necessarily,” Wilbur replied. “If you cooperate…” His voice trailed off.

Alison steered the car through light traffic, remembering another such flight when they’d first arrived in this year—this
wrong
year, where her old university mentor was much older and had a new protégée, a year where the RAA was practically a cult instead of just a separate country.

A year without family
.

Alison stared at the words etched in marble. A name, a pair of dates, “Beloved wife and mother.”

She and Wilbur were in 2100 for only a week when she asked to find her mother’s grave. As she’d stared at the placard behind which rested an urn, Wilbur patted her shoulder.

“They’re all gone now, my whole family.”

“Mine, too,” Wilbur said. He drew close, breath warm against her ear. “We’ll have to be family for each other now.”

This same tender man now held a gun on a stranger in the backseat of a vehicle invented over a century after his death. Alison felt a brief, inappropriate urge to begin giggling, not out of joy but from sheer madness.

She set the hovercar down in an alley beside an abandoned factory. Her hands shook when she took them off the controls.

~

Wilbur pulled the man from the hovercar and led him into the warehouse after Alison. “I promise you, sir, you have only yourself as an enemy here. If you’ll settle down, we’ll explain our purpose.”

“Go to hell,” Wheaton said.

Wilbur wanted to tell him he was already there, but that wasn’t true. So long as Alison was near, it wasn’t ever
all
hell, despite the abject chaos of this time.

The room they entered was dark, the dust so thick it assaulted the nose before the eyes. Alison pulled an electric lantern down from a metal shelf and snapped it on. One six-foot circle of the space was now illuminated in eerie blue-white light. Once the lantern was on, she set it on the floor and walked behind Wilbur to shut the door behind them.

Wilbur led Wheaton to the shelf and unlocked one wrist from its handcuff, securing the free end to one of the shelf’s supports. “I’m going to have to search you for the weapon now, sir. You’d save both of us a lot of time and embarrassment if you simply produced it.”

Wheaton sighed. “Left front jacket, inside,” he replied. “But you’ll never figure out how to work it.”

Wilbur reached inside Wheaton’s jacket. “I don’t much care about working it,” he said. “Mostly I just want to know what it is.”

“You gonna torture it out of me if I don’t tell you?”

“No, not me,” Wilbur replied. He looked at his wife. “That’s her job.”

It shouldn’t be, though
.
I should be willing, if it’s what’s needed, but it shouldn’t be needed.

Alison went to another set of shelves and pulled something heavy to the floor. It clattered against the concrete. She knelt, and there came the sound of metal working metal. In a moment, she was back within the circle of the lantern’s light with a scalpel in her hand.

“I didn’t take anatomy,” she said, “so I’m probably gonna be really bad at this.”

Wheaton fell apart. “God, no. Stop. I got it for this British guy. I don’t know his name, but it was for the RAA. They were gonna pay me because I could get over to Beta and they couldn’t do it alone. Please, for fuck’s sake,
not the face
. Anywhere but the face!”

Wilbur gaped at Alison, who’d already dropped the scalpel. All their nervousness, all their worries…

“My dear, I believe that’s what they call ‘too easy,’” Wilbur said.

“I’ll say,” Alison agreed. She turned to Wheaton. “Let’s get you more comfortable, Mister Wheaton. I think we can do business.”

Wheaton canted his head forward, gazing at the weapon in Wilbur’s hand. “Be careful. I have no idea what the thing does.”

“What did your contact say it does?” Wilbur asked.

“He didn’t say anything about a gun at all, just that they needed tech.”

Wilbur looked to Alison.

“Technology,” she explained.

“Is this nation so starved?” Wilbur asked. “You have flying motorcars, time travel…I dare say this is utopia.”

“Not all of it,” Alison said. “And ixnay on that stuff in front of
him
,” she said, gesturing to Wheaton. She tugged at Wilbur’s elbow, pulling him a few feet from the man. “Don’t get all ooh-isn’t-the-future-amazing in front of some guy we might have to…to…”

Wilbur put a hand against Alison’s cheek. “It’s all right, my dear,” he whispered. “I forget myself.” He approached Wheaton. “Sir, we have two options, and I don’t feature having to exercise one of them. I’m certain you would be in agreement.”

Wheaton’s face grew stern. “If it’s putting a bullet in my head, then yeah, I’m in agreement that sounds not so hot.”

“Our other option is for you to tell us how you came upon the device, and then my lovely wife is going to administer something to assist you with your memory,” Wilbur continued.

“Assist me?” Wheaton laughed. “You mean assist it
out
of me? That’s what they were going to do back at the agency in the first place.”

“This one is a little different.” Alison withdrew a hypodermic needle from her pocket and took the cap off its end. A bilious yellow liquid resided inside. “It goes back a little further than what the agency would have given you.”

“How
much
further?” Wheaton asked.

“It’s this or I have to dispose of your body,” Alison said, “which is
so
not what I went to school for.”

Wheaton squirmed. “How
much further
?” he repeated. He tried to force his chair to jump away from her approach. “Are we talking vegetable or are we talking last week?”

Alison tilted her head from side to side. “Eh, somewhere in between, I’d guess. I don’t really know. I’m not the scientist.”

Wheaton, now panic-stricken, looked at Wilbur.

“Different sort of scientist,” Wilbur said. “But I put a keen amount of trust in those who are better at these things than I.” He stepped aside, allowing Alison better access to Wheaton. “Go on, my dear.”

The scream Wheaton emitted as Alison hit the needle’s plunger was deafening. Wilbur wished for a rag to put in the poor man’s mouth. When it was over, Alison took the weapon, and Wilbur removed the bonds from Wheaton’s limbs.

“Are we going to the circus?” Wheaton mumbled against Wilbur’s shoulder.

Oh, dear
.

“I suppose, sir.” Wilbur glanced up at Alison. “I can’t leave him here like this.”

“Put him in a taxi,” she said. “Give the driver his home address. I have things to take to the agency.”

Agreeing to reconvene at their own home after both errands, Wilbur deposited a kiss on the back of his wife’s hand and hoisted Wheaton up, wrapping the heavier man’s arm around his own shoulders.

“Where’s my mommy?” Wheaton asked.

“You’ll be all right, sir.”

But Wilbur knew this client was likely never going to be quite all right ever again.

Wednesday, August 11, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

Kris liked old jazz records. She liked pianos and hi-hat cymbals and saxophones, all things she’d only seen in films, never in person, and she liked to listen to the lot of it on old records, great crates of them found in dusty shops. The technology to run things off plastic discs and streamed from the ether was gone, the power in the agency house all diverted to the time travel mechanisms, but the Victrola replica only needed a few watts of power. With just a near-invisible needle, a few inches of black vinyl engraved with subtle grooves via a technology so old, so lost it might as well have been magic, and Kris was awash in the tenderness of fingers pressing ivory, lips blowing across brass and wood, dead fingers and mouths working instruments that were now long destroyed, burned in battles or buried deep in landfills.

These dead men—and, dammit, Kris knew most of the instrumentalists were indeed men, but that was apparently something they were good for, coaxing these things into scales and climaxes—inspired nostalgia in her for things she’d never experienced, things she never would, unless she let Ben and Vere slip a bit of microchip into her hand and send her molecules splattering across the centuries.

No, that wasn’t her. Kris lived for the stories, lived for the flickers of images on a sputtering tablet screen or sepia-toned photographs in a well-read book. She lived for the way the clients recounted their journeys, and she lived for these haunting, tinny sounds from the point of the needle. These men’s names were like mantras to her, these moments alone with the Victrola were her church, her meditation, her everything.

Dave Brubeck. Miles Davis. George Winston. John Coltrane. Chet Baker. Django Reinhardt.

But today it was Harry Connick, Jr., though none of his schmaltzy vocals for her. She’d returned all those to the shop with a sigh of disappointment. “No singing,” she’d told the owner. He’d promptly given her vinyl dubs of his earlier work, piano solos or spare arrangements where the New Orleans prodigy accompanied just a bass and drums. This was where Kris’s heart swelled today, lying on the floor of the agency’s front room with her eyes shut, listening to a dead man’s nimble fingers running across the keys of a tune called “I Mean You.” Ben’s cat Bodhi was nestled next to her, and his rumbling purr was like an extra bass line beneath the music. Kris reveled in the song even as a stack of mail sat unopened, even as she knew things were bad and Ben and Eddy were fretting about important, scary matters. Somewhere deep in her soul she felt a pang of knowledge that it was too long since fingers had touched her the way Connick’s caressed the piano keys…

Somewhere there was a girl with dark, sad eyes, brows shaved back to effect a strange, haunted look, glossy hair in a shaggy blue Mohawk. This girl had hands almost as magical as these musicians’ elegant hands, but their very absence from Kris’s lithe body had gone on longer than their relationship had lasted.

Maura…

The track changed, and this one was more strings heavy, the bass line thrumming out the melodic motif of Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock.” Kris preferred the piano to dominate instead and wasn’t a big fan of the tune. She sighed, stretched, and peeled herself from the rug. Bodhi stretched and sauntered off to the kitchen. One of Kris’s feet protested, pins-and-needles numb. She shook it, favored it, half-limping over to the record player.