The Keepers (12 page)

H
ORACE SAT AT HIS DESK, FROWNING THOUGHTFULLY AT HIS
sandwich. There was nothing wrong with it—thin-sliced hard salami on plain bread, Horace's favorite—and he had every reason to believe it was delicious. The box, in fact, had already revealed to him that he would eat it.

And so he thought perhaps he wouldn't.

It had been five days since Horace had discovered what the box allowed him to do, but sometimes he still had to say the words out loud to himself, just to make it seem real: “I can see the future.” He'd been seeing the future through the box all along, of course; he just hadn't realized it. That night he'd seen Loki in the backyard, for example, only to discover him inside the house an hour later—he now knew that the Loki he'd seen outside, through the box, was the Loki of the future. And some of the other things he'd seen—the warehouse, his
own clock, the stars in the sky—he'd been seeing those things one day in advance, but there'd been no way to know it.

The past few days, he'd been more choosy about what he looked at, and the box had revealed a host of fascinating sights. His own future self, always looking big and clumsy and shaggy headed, just like today. His mother and his father, reading the next day's paper or watching the next day's television. He'd seen tomorrow's windswept trees where today's sat still and calm, seen today's shirt in tomorrow's dirty laundry.

The box was a blazing fire of temptation. From tests at school to the weather to a simple greedy urge to gather knowledge no one else had, a big part of Horace wanted to be glued to the box all the time. But he tried—
tried
—to use it sparingly. Horace strongly believed that this newfound power was not meant to be used carelessly. Mr. Meister had said as much—
“You should not open the box without reason.”
The box itself seemed to encourage this kind of caution, something Horace felt instinctively, in the same way you might know you were coming down with a cold before you actually felt sick. Horace was now so in tune with the box that he could no more betray its wishes than he could cut off his own arm. And there was another thing, too, something harder to describe. Horace was beginning to understand that seeing the future meant living a kind of folded life, a life in which the present always wrestled with expectations from the past. He found himself measuring what happened to him against what the box said was
supposed
to happen, and this seemed—there was
no other word for it—bad.

Once, the box showed him a dead mouse in tomorrow's laundry room, one of Loki's victims—though
today
the mouse was almost certainly still alive somewhere, unaware of what was about to happen to him. The box showed him a fire truck flashing by out front, and when the fire truck actually did scream by the next day, responding to some unplanned-for and unforeseeable crisis, Horace was struck with a sadness he didn't totally understand. It was distressing to know that something bad was going to happen but to be powerless to stop it.

But above all, Horace had learned one very important thing about the box and its visions of the future.

It could be wrong.

Last Friday before dinner, for instance, he managed to observe nearly a minute of the next evening's meal—pork tenderloins and asparagus, gestures and unheard conversations, the whole scene shifting wildly between blurry and clear. And then on Saturday, halfway through that actual dinner, Loki jumped up onto the table, a moment Horace had seen hazily through the box. Just as Loki landed, Horace—with reflexes only a knowledge of the future could have given him—put a hand in the cat's face. Disaster ensued: scrambling cat, sliding placemats, tipped wineglass, scattered asparagus . . . angry father. None of which the box had revealed. Horace didn't know who or what to blame, or if “blame” was even the right word. The whole episode made him sick to his stomach.
He was learning that there were consequences for looking through the box.

This incident helped him figure out why the box made some things look clear and other things look blurry. The clearer the viewing, the more likely it was to actually happen. Routine or regular events—meals, arrivals and departures, sleep, clocks—were usually very clear, and tended to happen just as the box showed. But if the box was hazy, that meant the future was in doubt and might not come to pass. Highly random events, meanwhile, flickered violently and were impossible to predict, as Horace learned when he tried to watch the lottery drawing on TV.

The scientist in Horace could not always resist testing the box. And it was the scientist in Horace that made him decide not to eat the salami sandwich this particular Sunday afternoon, even though the box had said he would. Never before had he
deliberately
set out to alter a future the box had revealed—the box was wrong sometimes, yes, but he had never
deliberately tried
to make it be wrong.

Horace was doing this partly because of the sign he'd seen himself holding, that first night:
YES HORACE
,
THIS IS TOMORROW
. He'd realized the next day that in order to make that future come true, he'd have to actually write the sign and sit on his bed with it at exactly the time he'd seen it the night before. He'd done that, a queasy feeling of déjà vu coming over him as he wrote the sign he'd already read. But ever since, he'd been going over that moment again and again, wondering
what would have happened if he had chosen
not
to write the sign.

Horace put down his sandwich without taking a single bite, a direct contradiction of the future he'd already seen. Immediately his vision bent, as though the world was wrinkling around him. A fierce, dense pain stabbed through his head and down into his belly. He rose, staggering, clutching his skull. He felt twisted and out of his body, like he was trapped in a bout of extreme dizziness, or a clinging dream of falling. It scared him. It hurt.

Horace stood, holding his head. He felt for the box, like feeling for the walls of a hallway in the dark. The box was there. It was not alarmed. It simply seemed to want a new future, a different path to replace the eating of the sandwich. So Horace threw the plate into the hallway. It bounced, scattering the sandwich across the carpet. His head took another stabbing lurch, and he swayed to the bed. But the box spoke to him, a steady, supporting hum. Horace lay down on the bed, looking at the stars on his ceiling, naming them one by one. Slowly—very slowly—the real world swam back into focus, began to feel solid again.

He was still lying there an hour later, still gathering himself, when a voice startled him to his feet. His mother's perplexed face peeked in, reading glasses perched high on her forehead. “Horace, why is there a sandwich in the hall?”

He let a few unlikely lies filter through his mind, but just said, “I'm sorry. I had a moment.”

“Well, moments happen. But later we clean them up.”

“Yes. Sorry. It was recent.”

“You okay?”

“I am . . .” Horace felt for the firmness of his presence in this instant, like feeling for the sturdiness of ice underfoot. “I am good,” he said. And he was.

His mother glanced back into the hallway. “I'm leaving that. Try to beat the cat to it, okay?” She came in, wandering past his desk. The box lay there, right out in the open. She let her fingers drift just over the top of it as she passed by, nearly touching it, freezing Horace in place. She crossed the room and slid onto the floor beside the bed, banging her head softly against the wall. “Ow,” she said.

They sat in silence awhile, and then, before Horace could stop himself, he asked, “Hey, Mom, if you could see into your own future, would you?”

“You mean actually witness it?”

“Yes.”

“No,” she said immediately. “I wouldn't want to be distracted from my life by a script that tells me how it's supposed to go.” She nodded, sure of herself, and Horace thought how neatly she'd described exactly what he'd been feeling. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh . . . we were talking about it in science class. Time travel. The future.”

“Horace, let me tell you something about the future. Everything the future is made of is happening right now.”

Late that night, Horace was still up. His mother's words had stayed with him, but he wasn't thinking about the future just now. He was thinking more about the past—at any moment, the lightning bug would be arriving from yesterday.

When the firefly had materialized first after its maiden voyage through the box, Horace had expected it to eventually die, to be honest. But it hadn't. And a few hours later, having watched the bug blink across the ceiling of stars like an airplane, Horace had done something impulsive: he got up, recaptured the bug, and sent it back into the box. That was how it had begun. When the bug reappeared the next night, Horace let it fly around a bit, then sent it forward again. And again the next night. And every night since.

Horace wasn't sure how the bug felt about it, but he himself had no plans to stop. Somehow, sending objects through the box—even living objects—seemed like a game, whereas spying on the future felt like a very serious endeavor. Plus Horace reasoned that he was extending the bug's life span. By a lot. According to his research, lightning bugs normally lived for two months. But in the last four days, the bug had actually aged only twelve minutes. The rest of the time, it was traveling, aging very little or not at all. At the rate it was going, Horace calculated, the lightning bug might outlive Horace himself. He looked forward to greeting the bug again every night. He viewed it as an adventurer, a pioneer. He had even come up with a name for it.

At 11:22, a tiny
pop
announced the bug's arrival.
“Greetings, Rip,” Horace said softly. He let the bug circle overhead for half a minute, then scooped it up with the box and sent it on. He peeked through the box, catching sight of the bug again in tomorrow's room. He checked it this way each night, a kind of maintenance test for the box. “You are flying,” he told the bug. “You will be flying.”

He went to the window. Not much was going on in Monday's backyard, although it looked as though it would be windy:
swaying trees, a car sliding by a block over on Glendon, the toolshed sagging and rundown, the red canoe
—and wait! Horace inhaled sharply.

A shadow on the lawn. A running figure.
A small figure, hood up around its face, scurrying across the side lawn, pressing itself against the shed
. Horace looked up quickly, trying to get a better view with his naked eye, forgetting he was looking at tomorrow. He hastily checked the box again. There she was, still standing in the shadows along the shed—the girl from the bus, from the alley behind the bookstore. She was here, sneaking into his backyard in the middle of the night.

Horace felt a surge of anger—Dr. Jericho was interested in this girl. She'd admitted it. What if she ended up leading the thin man here tomorrow night? She had to leave, now. Or not
now
, exactly, but . . . Horace held the box tight, watching the dark shed, waiting for her to move.

He didn't have long to wait. But when the moment came, he was utterly unprepared for what he saw:
the girl turning, not away from the shed, but into it, her shoulder disappearing into the
wall itself, as if it were water; now a leg vanishing, and half her torso; her hooded head, swiveling first into the wall and then out again, reappearing briefly for one last look around the yard; now another step, and her body was swallowed, trailing arm and trailing leg vanishing last, gone inside the shed
.

Horace blinked. He blinked again. She could walk through walls.

For a moment he thought maybe this was a new kind of uncertainty the box hadn't shown him before, an illusion. But he knew it wasn't. He could see the future. She could walk through walls. Did she have something like he did, some instrument that gave her this power? Had she been to the House of Answers herself? Of course—this had to be why Dr. Jericho was after her, too.

Horace swung into action. He snuck out of his room and down the stairs. He slid out the back door and into the cool yard. He raised the box toward the shed and immediately jumped at what he saw—
the girl, bursting out of tomorrow's toolshed wall at a run, headed right for him but glancing back at the shed; her lips, moving; anger on her face
.

As she drew closer, Horace saw she had her hand at her throat, and in that hand a bright object burned, looking for all the world as though it was white-hot—was it a cross? No, there was something funny about it. But this was the thing. This had to be what let her walk through walls. The girl ran right past where Horace was standing now and ghosted through the fence on the far side.

Horace set off after her. He was not a stealthy person, by any stretch of the imagination, but he had at his disposal a foolproof method of spying: the box. He could follow this girl tonight, without any risk whatsoever of being seen, and see what she would be up to tomorrow night. If he wanted to, he could follow her home now, just as she had followed him.

But keeping up with the girl proved to be very difficult. Using the box while moving was hard enough—like running while trying to watch the video screen on a phone. He could only catch glimpses of her, checking her progress every few seconds. Even worse, though, the girl cut straight up the center of the block, right across every backyard, which meant fences. Lots of fences. She passed through them as though they weren't there, and it was an incredible sight—the way the chain link fences materialized out of her back as she moved through them, the way she vanished into tall hedges without a rustle, like a phantom. Horace, however, had to hop those fences, fight through those hedges. He had stupidly left his shoes behind, too. When the girl disappeared through a tall wooden fence, Horace groaned; he was winded and his face was scratched, and his feet ached. How to catch someone who could walk through walls?