Watcher in the Woods (15 page)

Dad paced to the end of the room, turned, and came back. “And I think we should try to understand the reason for each rule in the first place.”

David lowered his face into his hands. “You're making my head hurt.”

“No, Dae, this is good. For example, why can't you bring a camcorder into another world and film your time there?”

David thought about Xander's camcorder that had dangled around his neck the entire time he was playing keep-away from hungry tigers. When he'd come back, all that had been recorded was static. He said, “How are we supposed to find out why the camera didn't work?”

Dad spread out his hands. ”I don't know! But that's part of what we're doing here, part of what this room, the MCC, is all about, right? Figuring stuff out, maybe even conducting experiments to learn more.”

David frowned. “Experiments” made him think of science class and failing more times than succeeding. He was already trying to get his head around “rules”—two sets of them!—and the very idea that this control center was an attempt to understand something that to David was not understandable: you've got a house with doorways to other times and places, people from those places who can step through and take your mom, and doors that can apparently shake off the locks you put on them—how could you
understand
any of that?

Dad started tapping his chin, thinking. He said, “Let's get a big wall calendar too. We can—”

“How do you spell
calendar
?” Toria asked.

Dad told her, then continued: “It'll help us keep track of what we've already done, how long everything takes to do.”

“Like what?” David said.

“Like . . .” Dad thought for a moment. “Like we came to Pinedale on August 13. We found this house the next day.”

Because you knew about it before we even started looking
, David thought. Instead of rubbing it in, he said, “And we moved in a few days later.”

“Right,” Dad agreed. “The seventeenth. Last Wednesday.”

“Just last Wednesday,” David repeated to himself. He could not believe how much had happened since then. It felt like months.

Dad said, “And three days later, yesterday—” He stopped.

David finished for him: “Yesterday morning is when Mom got kidnapped.”

Dad shook his head. “So quickly . . .”

Xander rushed into the room, out of breath and holding an armful of white tubes. David recognized them as rolled movie posters.

“Check it out,” Xander said. He dropped the posters on the floor and selected one, then smoothed it open against a bare spot of wall. It displayed a fierce warrior flexing his torso and arms of rippling muscles, gritting his teeth and obviously ready to fight.

“
300?
” David said. “What's that got to do with—”

“Think about it,” Xander said. He flashed a big grin over his shoulder. “We're going to be heading into worlds that so far haven't been very friendly to us. We need
guts
! We need to be ready to
fight!
Doesn't this psych you up for that?” He released the poster, which snapped back into a roll, and snatched up another one. He spread it out against the wall.

“
Gladiator!
” David announced: Russell Crowe looking bad and ready to take on the world.

“Yeah?” Xander said, nodding his head with enthusiasm.

“I don't know,” Dad said. He was studying the poster with narrow eyes, as though judging a science fair project.

“We can play some music too,” Xander said. “I've got tons of soundtracks. Stuff that will really get your blood pumping, you know? We can get one of those clock radios you connect your iPod to. Toria, put that on your list.”

She scribbled it down.

Xander nodded toward the posters. “I got
Commando, Die
Hard, Matrix
. . .”

“I like where you're going with this,” Dad said. He was using his teacher voice. “What bothers me is”—he put his finger on Russell Crowe's breastplate—“we're not these people. We don't have their training, their physical attributes . . .”

“That's not the point, Dad!” Xander said. “These help us get jazzed up for going over.
Mentally
, we're these guys. We're ready! We're tough! We can do it!”

Dad nodded but said, “I understand the mental part. I just don't want us to go diving headlong into a situation we're not ready for.”

“All right, look,” Xander said. He released the poster and quickstepped to the far end of the room. “How about if right here”— he turned in a circle, indicating the floor under him—“we
train
to be like those guys? We get in physical shape, and we learn whatever skills we might need in whatever world we're heading to.”

Dad shook his head. “Xander—”

Xander cut him off. “Dad! Even if I never learned how to wield a sword or hold a shield, just having the never-say-die warriors of
300
on my mind would have made me better at fighting that gladiator in the Colosseum. Maybe if you hadn't rescued me, I could have fought him off long enough to have found my own way back home, I don't know. But I do know soldiers in war get psyched up like this.”

“And soccer players,” David chimed.

“Right, athletes!” Xander said. “You're a history teacher. You've studied war. You told me once that battles are won in the mind long before they're won on the battlefield. Isn't
this
what you meant?”

Dad walked to where Xander stood on the other side of the room and looked around, as if trying to see it with Xander's eyes. After a time he smiled and nodded, then said, “Toria, put free weights and exercise mats on the list. Xander, get those posters up on the wall. David, don't you have some killer video game posters?”

David jumped up. “
Halo
,
Metroid
,
Call of Duty
.”

“Do they make you want to kick some butt?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“Go get 'em.” Dad clapped his hands together. “Come on, guys, let's do this!”

CHAPTER thirty

MOTHER OF MERCY NURSING HOME

Jesse Wagner fidgeted in his wheelchair. He looked at the clock for the thousandth time. Where was Keal? If anyone there would listen to him, it was Keal. To most of the staff at Mother of Mercy, he was just an old man
.
Heck, he was just an old man to the other old men and women who frittered away their final days in that depressing place. But Keal Jackson was different; he treated people with respect. He was an attendant at the home and knew who still had a light burning in the attic and who didn't.

Shafts of light from sodium vapor lamps in the parking lot streamed through the dirty windows of the community room. Little flecks of dust floated in the light like tiny insects with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

But Jesse did have something to do. Trouble was, he had no way of doing it. Not alone, not by himself. It'd been decades since he could walk without a cane, and eight years now that he'd needed a wheelchair.

He hunched over to stare at his slippered feet. “What good are you?” he yelled at them. “Can't keep a body standing. Can't even shuffle one in front of the other. What good are you!”

A booming voice came from behind him: “You talking to yourself again, Jesse?”

Finally!

Jesse straightened and craned his head around. He said, “'Bout time, Keal. I been waiting for you since yesterday! Don't you work anymore?”

“Gotta have a day off sometime,” Keal answered. He came around and dropped into the sagging, cracked vinyl chair in front of Jesse. “Stop being such a grouch.” He smiled, a creepy, Cheshire cat thing straight out of
Alice in Wonderland
. The man's skin was so dark, all Jesse's aged vision could make out were Keal's eyes and teeth.

Jesse leaned forward to place a shaky hand on top of Keal's and gave the attendant his most intent stare, trying to appear as serious and urgent as the task for which he needed Keal's help.

Keal misread the expression. “You suffering from gas today, Jesse?”

“No!” Jesse yelled in his loudest voice, which wasn't loud at all these days. The nurse at the desk in the corner didn't even look up from her magazine. He snatched his hand away and flapped it at the big black man. “I've got urgent business, Keal! Life-and-death business!”

“You don't say.” Keal leaned forward.

Jesse sighed with exaggeration. “Listen to me,” he said, taking time to make his words clear and strong sounding. “You've known me for what, six years?”

Keal nodded. “Since I started here.”

“Have you ever seen me lose my grip on reality? Have I ever rambled about dragons the way ol' Charlie Hobbs used to, God rest his soul? Have I ever thought the cafeteria was a sandy beach in Hawaii, the way Mrs. Thompson does?” He shook his head. “Always taking off her shoes and trying to hang ten on the tables. Have you ever had to restrain me because I thought the night nurses had come to kill me like . . . well, like half the people here? Have you seen me do
anything
crazy?”

Keal flashed his teeth at Jesse again. “I always said you got it together better than most of the staff, Jesse. I hope I'm half as aware when I'm your age . . . if I ever get to be your age.”

“So you got to listen to me now, Keal. I mean it. I ain't crazy, even though what I have to say will make me sound that way. Give me the benefit of the doubt, okay?”

Keal's teeth vanished, and the whites of his eyes narrowed. Jesse knew he was frowning.

Good
, he thought.
He's listening.

“I need you to take me somewhere,” Jesse said. “Someplace important.”

“Like . . . where? If it's the restroom, Jesse, I got you covered, man. Any farther than that, we got a problem.”

“California,” Jesse said firmly.

Another flash of teeth, and Keal boomed with laughter. “Oh, Jesse, Jesse . . . you know I can't take the residents outside the building, less'n it's to the hospital, or maybe an occasional field trip to the park.”

Jesse let him laugh. When it was all out of Keal, and the aide had caught his breath, Jesse said, “People will die if I don't get there. Lots of people.”

He felt Keal's big hand on his knee.

The attendant said, “Jesse . . . I . . . I don't know what to say. You know—”

“I know what I know,” Jesse snapped. “I have to get a message to someone, a message so important I have to do it in person. He may not believe me, otherwise. And I have to show him . . .”

“Show him what?”

Jesse closed his eyes. “I have to show him how to . . . to . . .” He didn't know how to say it differently, but he also knew how it would sound. “I have to show him how to save the world.”

“Save the world?”

“I know how it sounds.”

It was Keal's turn to sigh. He said, “Who is it you think you have to see?”

“I don't know who, exactly.” Jesse shook his head. “I mean, I
do
. . . but . . . but it's been so
long
. It could be almost anyone. No, not
anyone
. . .”

Keal gave his knee a gentle squeeze. “Calm down, Jesse. It's okay. So this guy—whoever he is—he's going to save the world?”

“Yes, yes, but he doesn't know it yet. I have to tell him.” He squeezed his eyes closed again. His lungs didn't work the way they used to. He had to pull hard just to get enough air. “His father, or his father's father, was supposed to show him, but I know he didn't. It's been too long. He didn't do what he was supposed to do. He left his post.”

“Post? Jesse, I have to say, man, you might as well be ranting about dragons and surfing on the tables, for all the sense you're making.”

Jesse gripped Keal's hand in both of his. He squeezed, but knew Keal hardly felt it. “His
post
,” he repeated. “The house. They left the house . . . for
years
they left the house.” He squinted at the whites of Keal's eyes. “It's not a house you want to leave. It's too special, it's too
important
.”

“A house, Jesse?” Keal said. “You're talking about a house?”

“Like no other house, like no other place.”

“And that's where you want to go? To this house? In California?”

Jesse pulled in air. He wasn't getting enough. He nodded.

“How do you know about this house, Jesse? Did you live there?”

Jessie smiled at a memory. Then other memories flooded into his head, wiping the smile away. He said, “I more than lived there.” He glanced around and leaned closer. Then he whispered, “I built it.”

CHAPTER thirty - one

MONDAY, 7 : 11 P . M .

Xander King had walked completely around the outside of the house. He had to plow through bushes and scale trees to do it, but he finally managed to film the entire exterior. He planned to upload the footage to their computer and print still pictures of every angle. He imagined a wall of house photos in the war room, David's “MCC.”

He stood midway between the house and the dirt road, where their 4Runner was parked. He squinted up at the second-floor windows above the porch roof and wondered if he should try to get a few close-ups of them. But it was early evening, and he was losing his light. The sun was already gone from the sky, leaving only a reddish-purple glow. Even that was fading fast.

The term “false twilight” came to him. It was when darkness came earlier than it should have, usually from a solar eclipse or because the shadows in a canyon grew dark with the slightest dropping of the sun. The woods around the house were like that, near-black despite the sky's luminance.

He didn't want to be outside much longer. Besides, they'd gotten up early and had to go to school again tomorrow. Dad would want them all to go to bed before too long.