The Time Travel Chronicles (16 page)

“This is completely insignificant to you, isn’t it?”

“No. Come on, man. We can deal. Okay? You and me. Sound good?”

For a moment, the guy didn’t do anything except breathe. Loudly; Toby could hear the rasp of each breath going in and out. Then the guy reached up and grabbed a bunch of his own hair in each hand.

That, too, made him look like a freaked-out little kid.

Toby glanced down at his phone, wondering if the guy would flip if he knew the police were actually coming.
No service
, it said. Not really a surprise, since they were in a basement. Maybe out on the edge of town, where reception was sometimes a little sketchy in spite of all those TV ads that said there was reliable service everywhere. He’d have to go upstairs, or outside, to get a decent connection.

If the guy would let him do that.

He was about to suggest that they both go upstairs when the guy said very, very softly, “We may not be able to fix this. I was young once, believe it or not. I remember deciding that most of what happened in the cosmos was of absolutely no interest to me, but trust me: this is very bad.”

“Uh-huh,” Toby said.

“You’ve broken the ribbon. You may have even severed it completely.”

Toby began to think about his parents, about how long it had been since he’d last seen them. Hours? Days? They had to be worried. Scared, maybe. In the strange pale light coming from the crazy guy’s coveralls he glanced down at himself and found himself dusty and messed up, but not hurt. He couldn’t see any blood, any cuts or scratches – which didn’t seem to agree with how much his body hurt, or that feeling of having been whirled around inside a tornado and flung into a brick wall.

Maybe his injuries were all internal. Which certainly wouldn’t be good.

“It’s, like, filthy down here,” he said in as casual a tone as he could manage. “It’s gonna bother my asthma. How ’bout we go upstairs” – he nodded toward the staircase he’d located over in the corner – “and we’ll get some fresh air?”

He smiled at the guy.

The guy, not at all helpfully, scowled at him.

Definitely not in the mood for this.

“And what do you think is up there?” the guy demanded. “What do you think is outside? Answers? Is that what you think?”

I think you need to go back where you came from,
Toby thought.

At least, he needed to be in the care of someone who understood what his deal was. Like last summer, when there’d been a whole to-do in the neighborhood over Mrs. Fischer, who had Alzheimer’s bad enough that if she went for a walk around the block, she couldn’t find her house again. She’d gotten out of the house one afternoon and was missing for almost three hours. They’d found her almost a mile away, sitting in the middle of someone’s lawn, crying into her hands. She was still weeping when they brought her home, something Toby had witnessed from across the street.

You couldn’t leave someone like that on their own. Someone who needed help.

No, he wasn’t obligated to help this strange guy, but…
Crap
.

He saw no harm in leaving the guy down here for a little while so he could go upstairs and use the phone, since there was nothing around that he could hurt himself with. Over in the shadows, Toby could see a couple of big old wooden barrels and a stack of odd-shaped pieces of lumber. Three wooden crates were piled near the stairs. He supposed the guy could whack himself in the head with one of the pieces of lumber, but maybe that wouldn’t happen, not in just a few minutes.

“I’m going upstairs,” he told the guy, and immediately started moving toward the stairs.

To his surprise, the guy didn’t stop him.

The stairs were in pretty bad shape – really rickety, creaking badly under Toby’s weight as he climbed, even though he was a serious lightweight – he only ever hit 140 pounds on the day after Thanksgiving. Frowning, he held on to the railing as he ascended the last few steps, afraid the whole staircase would crumble before he reached the top.

It didn’t, but…

“Wow,” he said as he emerged into the building above that mess of a basement.

It was a house, clearly, one he supposed you could call a mansion. He’d come out into what had once been a kitchen, though all that was left of it was a huge, battered sink and a ruined table thrown onto its side. It was a mammoth room with a toweringly high ceiling, easily four times as big as the kitchen at home, and through the wide doorway at one end he could see into another colossal room he supposed was a dining room. There was no furniture in there at all, just what looked like a rolled-up carpet shoved off to one side.

Everything was covered with dust. Little piles of dirt, dry leaves and bits of trash had accumulated in the corners.

No one had lived here in forever, he decided.

He kept walking, a burst of curiosity overwhelming his need to find help for the whack job downstairs. He kept his hand curled around his phone, though if someone had asked him whether he was trying to protect it, or intended to use it as a weapon, he probably could not have said. The floor creaked and squeaked as he progressed, and he noticed he was leaving footprints in the dust.

He still had no idea how he could have gotten there.

He prowled through a huge library that still had some old books lying on some of the shelves, though it looked like they’d been attacked by mice or squirrels, torn apart for use as nesting material. One chair remained in there, a big, battered wingback with a fatal rip in its seat cushion. From there he passed into what he decided was the living room, and from there he reached a room with three walls of windows. Several of the panes were broken, which he supposed had allowed for that accumulation of leaves and trash.

His mom would like this place, he thought. It would fascinate her. She’d daydream about how she’d fix it up if she had the money.

Each room had a fireplace. A real one, not gas. He thought that meant the house was crazy old, like the wall in Josie’s grandfather’s field. That made him twitch, because he didn’t know of any such house anywhere near home. Old houses, sure, but they only dated back to around the 1920s, maybe a little older. There was nothing like this, nothing that would have been a fabulous mansion back in its day.

Nothing that…

“SHIT!”

Toby shrieked and jumped back, almost lost his balance, and pinwheeled his arms frantically to keep from flopping down into the dust. In the process his phone went flying and he watched in horror as it bounced off the brick of the fireplace.

The crazy guy was standing there looking at him. His hair was all sticking straight out from his head, as if he’d walked into some giant field of static, but his expression was almost completely blank. Like he had a migraine, Toby thought. Like he was trying to function in the midst of terrible pain.

“Don’t DO that!” Toby shrieked. “Jesus! Could you not sneak up on me like that?”

The guy looked around. It seemed like it hurt him to move his head, so he kept shifting his feet a little at a time. Bit by bit, he examined the whole room, but what he was looking for, or trying to figure out, Toby couldn’t imagine.

Finally, he said softly, sadly, “I suppose it’ll do.”

“You suppose
what
will do? Do for what?”

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, the guy sat down on the dirty floor and arranged himself cross-legged with his hands resting on his knees. It looked like a yoga position.

“
Dude
,” Toby groaned. “What the
hell
.”

When the guy didn’t answer, Toby retrieved his phone. It hadn’t been wrecked, but there was a big crack in the case. It still seemed to work okay – he could open all the apps that didn’t need a WiFi connection – but there was still no signal.

“We’re going to need to strategize.”

The guy seemed to be talking to himself. His eyes were half-shut. His hands lay open on his knees, palms up.

“Am I kidnapped?” Toby demanded.

The guy lifted his head a little and blinked.

“Am I? Is that what this is? What’d you do, drug me or something? I don’t know what this is about, man. I’m only fourteen years old. We – my family – we don’t have any money. And if you want me for a sex slave or something – I took self-defense, okay? They had a special thing through my school and the police department and some group this woman started because of her son. They taught all the kids how to defend ourselves. I’ll bite it off, dude. Don’t think I won’t.”

“Go outside,” the guy said.

“What?”

“Go outside. If you like. Go out and look around, and tell me what you think your options are.”

“Why, because you brought me out to the middle of nowhere? I go hiking with my dad and my uncle and my cousins all the time. I know how to find a main road. I know how to find help and how to find water and stuff to eat in the woods. You’re not messing with somebody who’s gonna fall apart. I can do this.”

“Then go outside.”

The guy seemed calm… but Toby had seen a lot of movies. He fully expected to reach the front steps only to have the guy haul him back inside and hack him to bits with an axe, or a huge old knife. He’d be left out in the woods, he figured, so animals could devour his corpse. Or maybe inside this old, dusty house, shoved into a closet or a cupboard, and someday someone would find his bones.

On the other hand, even in those movies,
someone
usually got away.

So he took off.

He galloped through that row of huge rooms to the front door, pleading silently for it to be unlocked, giddy with gratitude when he found that it was. He hauled it open, flinging it so that it banged against the wall alongside the frame, and flew out onto the wide, sprawling front porch.

There, he stopped.

Not because the guy (or anyone else) had grabbed hold of him and hauled him back, but because he was utterly stunned by what lay beyond the front steps.

Snow.

Not a lot of it; most of it had melted, leaving the ground mostly brown and dead. But there was enough left to tell him it had been a good-sized storm, that maybe there’d been a foot or more to begin with – the drifts that lay in the shadows of the house were that deep.

Snow.

In
August
?

Because he was sure the guy would be standing there behind him, he swung around, hands balled into fists. Sure, okay, there was likely to be a lot of snow somewhere in the world at any given time, but not in Pennsylvania. Not in
August
.

So they’d taken him… where? Alaska? Siberia?

Nothing nearby gave him any answers. There were some trees off in the distance, but everywhere else the ground was flat and featureless. There were no buildings other than the house, though he supposed there might be something out back. A garage, maybe, or a barn. Maybe there were other houses in that direction. Something. There had to be something.

“Where
am
I?” he squealed. “Where
is
this place?”

The guy blinked at him from the doorway. “Not where,” he said on a long breath. “When.”

“
What?
”

Stuff like this just didn’t happen, Toby thought. Not outside of nightmares. Or movies. He’d been minding his own business, waiting for the Realtor to finish telling his parents about closet space and flooring and whether the stupid plumbing worked okay – and now he was
here
, with some nutball stranger in glowing coveralls. It made no kind of sense that he could fathom, even if he had been kidnapped. A psycho killer wouldn’t be sending him outside. Wouldn’t sit on that dirty floor like he was doing yoga, babbling about ribbons and strategies.

He started to shiver. His long-sleeved t-shirt and cargo pants had been plenty warm enough for house hunting – too warm, really, inside that house with no AC. But here, where it was apparently… what? March? Not so much.

“Mister…” he said, inching back toward the door. Inside, at least, it was a little warmer.

The guy blinked at him again, eyelids fluttering in a way that made Toby dizzy. Then he heaved a sigh and said, “Asher.”

“That’s your name?”

The guy groaned and rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s my name.” Then he turned and strode back into the house. When Toby had joined him, he pushed the massive door shut and leaned against it. “John Asher,” he said. “
Doctor
John Asher. I suppose I shouldn’t tell you that, but the damage has already been done. We won’t be able to undo any of this. The best we can do is avoid any further tampering.”

“With what? The house? We didn’t–”

“What’s your name, boy?”

The sharpness in Asher’s tone made Toby flinch. “Toby Cobb. What kind of doctor? A medical doctor? Or–”

“Temporal physics.”

“Then, like, what, a PhD doctor?”

“Yes,” Asher said. “Like a PhD doctor.”

“And what? That gives you the right to snark at me like you found me making a mess in your lab? Like I… I don’t even know what. I don’t know you, dude. I was waiting for my mom and dad in some house. Not this one. A new one, one of those ones where they all look the same. All of a sudden something hit me and I ended up here. Well, not
right
here. I was someplace else first, and then I was here. But none of it’s my fault, okay?”