Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (38 page)

She wrestled her way up the tallest spruce she could find, filthying her clothes in the process. Her head throbbed, and she stopped fifteen feet up to dry-swallow another couple of Advil. They hadn’t been helping much, but she didn’t want to think about the pain that would result if she stopped taking them altogether. She sucked the water from her lips, grimaced, and fought upwards ten more feet before settling into a sturdy crotch.

There was the lighthouse, all right. She’d found her clear shot.

A promontory of rocky land stretched northward and out into the choppy gray of the sea. The lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head stood on its tip, stark and sentinel. The building caught the dying light of the falling sun, but only on its western flank—the other side was shadowed and hidden.

Perfect.

She snapped a couple of quick shots to capture the chiaroscuro, using the spruce needles around her to frame the pictures. Whoever viewed them would sense the surrounding flora, would feel like a lurker in the woods peering out at the half-shadowed building as if in ambush.

She slowed down and started playing with the digital settings. The machine was the closest thing she had to a lover, and she touched it with knowledge born of long experience, caressing and coaxing and prodding all the right places. Like a lover, she knew how to produce what she wanted from the Canon, and the two of them moved in perfect, primal rhythm.

Lightning flared in the distance over the ocean and Laci cursed. Halfway up the tallest tree in the short forest wasn’t where she wanted to be if the storm hit in earnest. She started to inch her sneaker down to the next branch. Her head throbbed as a roll of thunder swept in over the beach, over her. Rain fell harder, hitting her exposed face like the sting of a wet towel. Looking out over the water, she decided she had time for one more shot before it was time to pack it in.

She raised the Canon to her eyes, scrolling back over the pictures she had just taken. At frame seven she stopped.

She squinted through the mist. Another explosion of lightning out at sea, and then a sweep of thunder. She ignored the flash and the shadowed darkness that followed, peering intently at the little view screen on her camera.

Something—
someone
—stood there, on her screen. Atop the empty lighthouse, half a mile distant. A black silhouette.

She pressed closer to the slick bark of the spruce’s trunk and started pushing the zoom buttons. She enlarged, enlarged again, clicked on the upper-right quadrant to focus; enlarged again.

Two faces, not one. Young faces, grainy with distance and low resolution. Black eyes moist, peering across the rocks, over the trees.

Four arms, two of them lightly grasping the rail outside the lamp chamber, two held in the air at odd angles. Wind whipped their hair into a spiderweb around them. Their clothes were strange, archaic.

The two boys were joined at the hip.

They stared straight at her, solid black eyes making the hundreds of yards of space disappear.

They hadn’t been in the previous frame, taken only a second before.

She managed to get to the ground and shook the water from her hair. When she did, pain hit her with stiletto sharpness, and an involuntary cry left her mouth as she whipped her hand up to the side of her head, cradling the small scar above her ear. She massaged the bulge, born of scar tissue and healing bone, and forced her breath into controlled bursts until the light behind her eyes receded.

Eventually, she opened her eyes. She could see the lighthouse through the trees, but it was still dim February and whoever was in charge of the historic lighthouses of the coast hadn’t started the season yet. The distant building was now fully shrouded in gloom as the sun shimmered weakly on the horizon, an old man going to bed. She moved through the slick leaves and greedy, slurping mud of the little forest toward Frenchman’s Head.

There were two young boys atop the lighthouse in the storm. They might need help.

But that wasn’t it—not really. She was sensitive to phenomena, and she knew a little about the spirit world. It was why she was on this trip, after all—she normally photographed auras and haunts, and she’d only stopped to shoot the lighthouse on a whim. And in her deep places, she knew that the boys weren’t going to need help when she got there.

But she needed help, all right. She needed
this
, whatever it was. She moved a little faster. If she hurried, she could make it there in twenty minutes.

The lighthouse was monolithic; a great pale erection jabbing out of the earth and thrusting toward the sky. It loomed over Laci as she struggled through the wet tangle of trees and brush that covered the gorge below the cliffs. Far below, the ocean surf spasmed and released onto the rocks.

As Laci approached the sentinel, her stomach churned. There was energy here. It danced along her spine and tickled the back of her neck.

“
Hello?” she called, blocking the rain from her eyes with her hand. She held her camera in her other hand and as she rounded the side of the building she instinctively pulled it close, like a shield.

The children loomed over her, not speaking, barely breathing.

The two boys, identical twins, watched as Laci approached. Their black hollow eyes stared down at her from the promenade of the lamp room. They were attached at the hip, their old-fashioned schoolboy uniforms perfectly stitched to allow for the disfiguration.

Their black hair shone like kerosene dripping from their pale brows. They barely moved as they clutched the guard rail. The wind tugged at their clothes, but if the driving February rain was cold on them their faces didn’t register it.

“
Hello?” Laci said again, but more quietly, more hesitantly. Acting on instinct, she drew the camera to her face and pressed the trigger. The Canon fluttered, snapping off a flurry of shots.

The boys said nothing.

She framed her shots and bled the last bit of light from the sky. Then she opened her cell phone and called 911.

The Sheriff’s car was quickly followed by a camera crew from the local news station, and when Laci saw it coming she looked at Officer Danton.

He shrugged. “They scan the police band.” He wore his rain slicks and had his Maglite out. Adjusting his hat, he clicked the light on and flipped it toward the third level of the lighthouse.

“
Jesus
Christ
,” he said, taking a half-step back toward his car.

Two pairs of black eyes shone down at him. The boys stared at Laci, ignoring the cop. They were soaked to their pale skin.

“
Conjoined twins,” Laci said, snapping a slow-shutter picture in Danton’s light. ‘I have no idea where they came from. They weren’t there—then they were.”

“
Hello?” Danton asked. He kept the light on their faces. The stark, bright beam elongated the shadows on their cheeks, under their eyes. “You…
kids
all right?”

The boys said nothing. They briefly swiveled their heads, looked at the source of the light, then turned back in tandem to stare again at Laci.

“
I think they could be deaf,” she said, shuddering in the chill rain. “They don’t respond to me. I don’t know that they can hear us.”

The television crew parked their van several meters back from the squad car. Laci watched as a young woman got out and unloaded some camera gear while a man checked himself in a side mirror.

“
Can you hear me?” Danton suddenly yelled. “How did you get up there?”

“
The door on the side is locked,” Laci said. “I already tried it.”

“
Maybe they locked it when they went up there?”

“
Doubt it,” said Laci. “It’s a big old padlock. Looks like it’s been there a while.”

Danton turned to Laci. “Guess you thought of everything, then, didn’t you?”

“
Sorry,” Laci said. “I’ll let you do your job.”

“
Thank you kindly, ma’am,” said Danton. “Since you’re so eager to help, you want to hold this flash for me while I grab some my lock tools out of my trunk?” He smiled disarmingly at her, showing perfect teeth.
No hard feelings,
the smile said.

“
Glad to, Sheriff.” She took the Maglite from him and held it on the boys.

They said nothing. They did nothing.

All along the coast, windows were shuttered and doors locked as the wind picked up and the rain intensified. A storm was on the way, and there was no telling what it was going to bring with it.

Eventually they got the children off the balcony, and Sheriff Danton called an ambulance to come get them. Aside from their bizarre condition, they appeared to be physically fine. They were pale and thin, but the medics announced that their hearts were healthy and all their vital signs stable.

The children refused to speak, however, and because they hadn’t appeared in any missing person reports, the sheriff decided that they would go to the children’s hospital in Calamity Falls until the proper authorities could be determined and contacted.

Laci, meanwhile, spoke to the local TV crew about finding the boys and what she had been doing in the woods. They offered her five hundred dollars for her photos, which she accepted, and then the Sheriff gave her a ride back to her car.

She checked into a Motel 6 with strict instructions that she was not to leave town until the Sheriff had talked to her again, and the police department paid for her room. She waved as the Sheriff drove away, but as soon as he was out of the parking lot she ducked behind her car and vomited until there was nothing left in her stomach.

She was exhausted from her exertions and the miserable weather, and her head pounded flashes of blinding light behind her eyes with every beat of her pulse. She massaged the tender flesh behind her ear and it relieved a bit of the pressure, but not as much as some Percocet and a hot shower would.

The Percocet she had in her handbag. The shower was waiting for her in her rented room. She stood there for another few seconds, in the antiseptic glare of the vapor lights of the parking lot, then slowly began to walk toward the motel and warmth.

She awoke to the sound of knocking, and for a few moments was disoriented—she wasn’t in her bed, she wasn’t in her apartment, and she couldn’t hear the normal morning noises of traffic and the upstairs neighbors arguing about money.

And then it came back to her—the boys on the balcony. That strange silhouette, the gently waving arms, the spiderweb hair.

Those black, black eyes.

She heard the knock again, and looked toward the door of her room. It would be Sheriff Danton, she was sure, ready to continue the interrogation of the night before.

“
Just a minute,” she called, and frowned at the sound of her own voice. Before the operation and all the treatments, she had sounded like a robust young woman. Now her voice was that of a much older person—a frail person, a weak person.

“
Just gotta put some clothes on,” she told the door, and she forced herself to put some strength into it. She rolled off the bed and looked for her slacks and shirt, found them in a crumpled heap and shrugged into them. She checked the night table, saw the camera and her keys, nodded, and dragged herself over to the door. In some odd way she was looking forward to this, the questions and answers. Her attention, her imagination, had been completely captured by the twins at the lighthouse, and maybe she could learn more about them from the policeman.

But when she opened the door, it wasn’t Sheriff Danton standing there on the other side. It was an old man, seventy or eighty maybe, with a face lined like ancient parchment, hands gnarled by arthritis and a shock of white hair over each ear.

“
I’m sorry, miss,” he said, his voice hesitant, his posture uncertain. “You don’t know me, but I got your name from the folks at the newspaper, and I figured you’d be staying here, so I thought…”

They both stood there for a moment, the man holding one hand in the other, not looking straight at her, Laci confused and feeling rumpled in her already-worn clothes. Then he spoke again.

“
You took those pictures of the boys at Frenchman’s Head yesterday,” he said, “and I’d be obliged if I could ask you a few questions about them.”

“
You—
who are you?
” she asked finally.

“
I’m sorry,” he said again. “No manners at all! My name’s Caleb Mears, and I’m from here in Calamity Falls. I used to be the keeper at the lighthouse, back in the fifties, after the war.”

“
Oh my,” she said, a rush of interest shooting through her. “
Absolutely
you can come in—sorry I look like this, but I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I was too tired to get my stuff out of the trunk…”

“
Oh, no need to apologize,” said Mears, smiling. And now he looked at her, and she felt a frisson as she saw his eyes—they were clear and black, and for a moment she had a vertiginous sense that it was the twins standing there before her, in their schoolboy outfits and mussed hair—but the moment quickly passed as she stood aside and let the old man enter. “I’ve been married to three women, and they were none of ‘em fashion models straight out of bed. You look a damn sight better than most early risers.”