Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (40 page)

“
Corpse Cove,” she said.

“
Bingo,” whispered Caleb, and took another long pull from the bottle. “There’d been a wreck that I didn’t know about—some pleasure boat on a long fishing trip from Astoria. They hadn’t bothered to let anyone know where they were going, so none of us were on the lookout for ‘em or anything. But they wrecked, all right, and the five people on board all washed up in the cove that day. And Jed and Jerry—they were there.”

“
What were they doing?” asked Laci querulously. Her weak voice was back, and she didn’t care.

“
Standing over those poor men, chittering,” said Caleb. “Standing over them, waving their arms, gabbling to each other in that language they had. I didn’t find ‘em—Sally did. I just heard all about it that night, in bed. How they would sometimes kneel down, stroke the bloated skin of the dead men, smile and chant, and how Sally screamed at them while she spent ten minutes picking her way down the slope to get to ‘em. But they never heard her, or just plain ignored her.”

He stopped again. Looked at Laci.

“
You haven’t asked me how it’s possible,” he said.

“
What do you mean?” she asked.

“
My boys,” he said. “They’re still nine years old. You saw ‘em. But they was nine in the early sixties, and they haven’t aged any since then.”

“
Maybe I’ve got a better perspective on some things than your normal girl,” she said. “I took a picture of a ghost once in a dressing room at a strip club. It was a murdered stripper, and she only showed up after the club closed. I spent two weeks there, and finally she showed herself. Your boys—they don’t shock me.”

“
They’re not ghosts,” said Caleb. It’s like they stepped out of the past, if the past wasn’t just a memory. Like it was an
actual place
, and they finally made their way back.”

“
I know,” she whispered. “They’re…I don’t know what they are. But they’re not dead. I like that analogy. Time travelers.”

“
Not dead,” he said quietly, “but their mother is. Sally—I woke up one morning and Sally was gone. The boys were in their room, looking at a picture magazine I’d brought back from my last trip to the Falls, looking at it upside-down, like it didn’t matter. And I knew.

“
She was dead at the base of the cliff,” he said, looking at the bottle before him as if judging how long it would take him to kill it. “She’d climbed up to the lantern room, let herself out onto the balcony, and jumped off the cliff side. I ran down both sets of ladders, fought my way down the hill to where she was, but the tide had come in by the time I got there, and I couldn‘t even find a body to bury.”

“
I’m so sorry,” said Laci. “Truly, Caleb—I’m sorry.”

“
No call for that,” he said. “No call at all. You had nothing to do with it.”

“
I’ve got something to do with this,” she said. “I just don’t know what.”

The phone blazed in its cradle, startling both of them. Laci put a hand to her chest and let out a little laugh.

“
I see we’re both jumpy,” Caleb said, chuckling into the bottle.

“
A little,” Laci said. “I should get this; it might be the Sheriff. They wanted me to stay in town.”

Caleb waved a permissive gesture at her.

“
I’ll just sit here with my bottle quietly,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell him I’m here. I don’t really want to talk to anyone else about this.”

Laci nodded, then reached out to pick up the receiver.

“
Hello?” she said.

“
Ms. Powell?”

“
Yes—is this Sheriff Danton?”

“
Yeah,” he said. “Listen, Ms. Powell. You need to turn on your television right now. Jesus Christ—you’re never gonna believe this. Channel 10. I’ll wait.”

“
Okay,” Laci said. She shot a puzzled look toward Caleb, who was watching her intently. Then she walked over to the TV and clicked it on.

“…
again, the twin boys, apparently from eight to ten years old and as yet unnamed, managing to somehow get
outside
their room on the third floor of the Calamity Falls Children’s Hospital, and are now considered to be missing somewhere in the vicinity of the Falls…
”

“
What the hell?” Laci asked, putting her hand to her mouth and dropping onto the chair.

Caleb put the bottle down and crossed his arms over his chest, holding himself.

“…
you’re going to see this amazing Channel 10 exclusive one more time, Diane, and I have to say this is probably the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my fourteen years as a broadcast journalist. This footage was captured just a short time ago by our own cameraman John Davis while we were waiting outside the hospital for word on the mystery twins that had been found on the lighthouse…
”

The screen went blank for a moment, then Laci gasped.

Caleb sucked in his breath.

The screen showed the outside wall of the Children’s Hospital. It was old gray stone with rows of double-paned windows on each floor. About thirty feet up, battered by wind and lashing rain, Jedidiah and Jeremiah were carefully making their way down the side of the building. The cameraman was talking off-screen, but the noise of the storm whipped away his words

The children
scuttled
down the gray bricks, moving headfirst toward the ground. Their arms and legs were somehow able to find minuscule perches, keeping them from falling, and they worked in perfect harmony. It gave a gangly, over-jointed impression to their movement.

“
Oh my God,” Laci whispered.

The children stopped their downward scuttle for a moment about halfway to the ground and looked directly at the camera. Even through the rain their eyes shone like black diamonds. Lightning crashed overhead and they tensed, as though they might fall.

“
So that’s how they did it,” muttered Caleb. He began to rub his arm self-consciously.

Jedidiah and Jeremiah looked at each other, and Laci could see that they were talking to themselves -
chittering
, Caleb had called it. Then they swiveled their heads in unison toward one of the tall pines standing nearby.

They tensed their legs and leapt into space.

Laci gasped.

They sailed into the darkness, their arms and legs spread as though they were making snow angels. When they hit the tree, they bounced, disappearing briefly into the dense green foliage. There was a crash as they hit the branches and off-camera several onlookers screamed.

The boys were lost for a moment as the tree shook, then they reappeared, crawling spider-like down the trunk. When they got to the ground, they leapt to their feet and scurried off into the deeper darkness of the woods.

“
Holy shit,” Laci breathed.

On the screen lightning flashed again, and as the thunder pealed across the sky there was a brief, dazzling instant where the twins were perfectly outlined, their loping gait caught in the final frames of film, their arms waving like an anemone in the rain. The light gone, the screen went black.

“…
Sheriff Danton has asked people to be on the lookout…
”

“
Oh,
crap!
” Laci said. She got up and stumbled to the phone, her feet unstable. She picked it up with two hands and held it to her ear.

“
Hello?”

“
Laci,
goddammit
,” Danton said. His voice was angry. “I don’t have time to sit on the phone all night…”

“
Sorry,” she said. There was a moment of silence.

“
So did you see it?” Danton asked. The anger was gone—now there was something in his voice that sounded dangerously like
fear
.

“
I saw it,” said Laci. “I can’t believe it.”

“
Well, I didn’t either. But it happened. Any idea where they might be headed?”

“
No, I…” she stopped, then, as Caleb put a hand on her shoulder. Then she nodded.

“
I have no idea, Sheriff.” She turned and looked into Caleb’s pale, frightened face. He looked a hundred years old.

“
Do you think they might be going back to the lighthouse?”

“
Do
I
think they’re going to the lighthouse?” she repeated, making sure Caleb could hear. He immediately shook his head
no
.

“
No, Sheriff,” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the old man’s. “Why would they? I think they probably just ran off into the storm. If they don’t die of exposure, I’m sure someone will see them and call it in.”

“
That pair would be hard not to notice, I guess,” Danton said. “Okay, Ms. Powell. If I have time, I’ll keep you informed about what’s going on here. I still need to talk to you, though, so don’t go anywhere. I’ll call you by tomorrow at the latest.”

“
Goodnight, Sheriff, and thank you for calling me,” Laci said.

“
Goodnight, Ms. Powell.” There was a pause, then a click.

The lights flickered, once, as she put the phone down.

“
We have to go,” said Caleb. He reached for his coat, began to slip into it.

“
To the lighthouse, right?” Laci asked.

“
That’s the only place they could be going. It’s where they went before.”

“
What did you mean when you said ‘so that’s how they did it’, Caleb?” Laci grabbed her coat, and picked up a ball cap to keep the rain out of her face.

“
Come on,” Caleb said, picking up the Maker’s Mark. “I’ll tell you in the car.”

The rain made driving more than twenty miles per hour impossible. It blasted the windshield of her car, and she could barely see a couple of feet in front of her. The wipers worked overtime, but they may as well have been shut off for all the good they were doing.

“
Take a left up here,” Caleb said. He took a swig from the whiskey bottle.

Laci almost said something when she smelled the tang of the booze, but decided against it. The old man had been through several varieties of Hell tonight, and she figured she wouldn’t add to his problems. Instead, she decided to get back to the story.

“
You gonna tell me what they did?”

Caleb shook the whiskey sting away.

“
They were at that hospital before,” he said. “After Sally died, I couldn’t handle it. I blamed the boys for her death. Oh, they didn’t
push
her off that ledge, but it was their weird ways that drove her to jumping.

“
So after we had an empty-casket service for her, I arranged to have the kids sent to the sanitarium. Cedar Pine, the place was called back then.”

Laci took her eyes off the torrents cascading down the windshield and looked over at him. He nodded, staring straight ahead.

“
Yep,” he said. “I put ‘em in the crazy house. I couldn’t stand to think about just me and them in the house together, way out in the middle of nowhere. No one to help me, should they ever decide that I was in their way, too.”

“
I guess
…I guess that’s understandable,” Laci said.

“
I put ‘em up, then moved the hell away from here. All the way to California, where I had some kin. Got a job working’ in a shoe factory. Mostly, I just tried to forget about Jed and Jerry.”

Laci pulled off the highway and crept onto a lonely stretch of road that led further up the coast. It had been the original highway before the four-lane road had been built. Now it was a scenic route—or would have been, could they see ten feet past their windshield.

“
One day about six months after I moved, I got a phone call from Cedar Pine,” Caleb said. He took another sip of whiskey. “Seems my boys somehow managed to find their way out of a locked room on the fourth floor of the place. Just up and walked off into the woods, like that. Nobody knew where they’d gone.
I
didn’t know for a long time, neither - ‘til I got a letter from John Newman, the fellow the USLS put in charge of the lighthouse after I left.”

“
He’d seen them?” Laci asked.

“
He’d seen
somethin’
,” Caleb said. “He wrote me a letter and asked if I ever saw anything weird out near Corpse Cove—some strange wild animal or somethin’. Some kind of creature that lived in the trees, ate dead animals off the highway and things like that. He also said there’d been a couple more wrecks offshore, and hardly any bodies had washed ashore—or, if they had, something had gotten to ‘em before the authorities could. Wanted my advice on how to deal with the situation.”

“
What did you do?” Laci asked.

“
I called him up,” Caleb said. “Asked him to go into details about this…creature, but before he’d even said two sentences I knew it was my boys. Said whatever was living in Corpse Cove was coming up into the balcony of the lighthouse at night when the lamp was on. Couple times he’d seen it from the Keeper’s house, standing in the night like a giant spider or somethin’. Poor bastard thought he might be going crazy.”

“
What did you tell him?”

“
Nuthin’,” said Caleb. “He told me he’d been out there with his binoculars one night in a rainstorm—like tonight’s—and he could see them outlined every time the lamp swung round inside the lighthouse. So he decided to take their picture. Ran inside, grabbed his camera, snapped a shot or two, then
bam!
They was gone.