an unpublished novel
The boy was encased in a glass tank filled with pale purple liquid. He was tall and burly, his head nearly touching the top of the tank, brown hair drifting lazily around his face. A breathing apparatus was strapped over his mouth and nose, making it difficult to tell if he was handsome—he had strong cheekbones and a sharp nose, but his eyes were closed.
He was naked. Naked as a jaybird, as old people said. Ripley felt a strange squirming in her belly. She had seen naked boys before—a boy at a foster home where she’d lived for a few months liked to walk around with no pants on—but it was different with this boy, who seemed to be sleeping inside his glass tank. It made her feel like a peeping Tom.
“This is Vincent,” said Christopher.
“Put some clothes on, guy,” said Oliver.
“He can’t hear you, Mr. Cooke,” Christopher went on. “Vincent came with … all this. When we found this place, we found him. He was the only living creature here.”
The room where they stood was small. Other than the tank, its main feature was a control panel with many blinking lights and switches.
“We found Vincent nearly two years ago,” said Christopher. “Here in this room. He hasn’t moved. He is in some form of suspended animation. The Book tells us that he will release himself when everything is ready.”
“What book?” said Ripley.
“Appliances and cars and even Aspirin come with instruction manuals,” Christopher told her. “So does this place. But its instructions are quite a bit bigger than those in any manual. It’s a Book. A rather large one, as you might imagine. In it is everything we need to keep this place running. It doesn’t answer every question, but enough to put the plan into action.” He held up his hand. “I know what you’re going to ask. What plan? We’ll get to that.”
Ripley forced herself to keep her eyes trained on Vincent’s face. Air bubbles came out of a vent in his facemask, following the curve of his jaw as they floated up to the—
The boy’s eyes opened.
Ripley took a step back. “Has he ever done that before?”
Christopher looked at the tank. He inhaled sharply.
“No,” he said, unable to hide his shock. “This is a first.”
He went over to a phone on the wall. The boy in the tank watched Ripley. His eyes an intense antifreeze blue. Was he smiling behind the mask?
“His eyes are open,” Christopher told someone on the phone. “No movement, just the eyes.”
When Christopher hung up, Vincent closed his eyes again. They all waited to see if he would reopen them. When it became clear he would not, Christopher said, “I have one last thing to show you.”
He led them through a door on the far side of the room. Jake and Oliver tried to go through at the same time and found themselves jammed in the doorframe. Jake shot Oliver an aggravated look.
“You first, my lord,” he said acidly.
“Are you trying to make me feel bad, Legs?” Oliver chuckled, stepping through the doorway in one big hop. “You don’t know me very well.”
The room was cramped with the five of them inside, the ceiling so low that Christopher and Gavin had to bend their knees.
Another door was set into the far wall. A tiny round door made of wood. The door had a black knob. The knob pulsed with an energy Ripley could feel over every inch of her skin—a tremor like touching a railway track as a locomotive bore down on you.
Christopher’s mouth was pinched with concern—as though he, too, felt uncomfortable being so close to the door. “Step back, all of you,” he said, his voice tight with strain.
He knelt and placed his hand on the doorknob. Taking a deep breath, he opened it—
Milk. That’s what the substance behind the door looked like. Ripley could see its surface rippling slightly—a wall of milk. Beads of it rolled down the face of the door. What was keeping the liquid there? Why didn’t it slosh out? It seemed to be moving. Rushing past the door at a swift clip. Droplets spat off the edge of the door frame and hit the floor; those drops ran back towards the door to quickly rejoin the flow.
It may have looked like milk, but Ripley knew that it couldn’t be milk. Not just because it didn’t behave like the stuff she’d poured on her breakfast cereal. It was more the feeling she got looking at it—the tremor became stronger, so powerful that the hairs on her arms stood up like quills.
“This,” said Christopher, “is … time, for lack of a better word. Picture time as a stream. The current of time flows in one direction, into the future. If you want to go back, you’d have to swim against the current. It’s more natural to flow with it, but it is possible to travel in the opposite direction.”
Ripley looked at Oliver and Gavin. Their eyes were as wide as saucers. Jake’s eyes weren’t quite so big. Maybe he’d seen this before. But he was sitting bolt upright, his fingers clenched on the wheels of his chair.
“There is nothing unusual on the other side of this wall,” Christopher said, indicating the wall the door was set into. “If you were to leave this building and locate the other side of this wall, you would find yourself outside. There’s a patch of grass and an anthill last I checked. But in there,” he pointed to the flowing milk, “space goes on and on. We tried to measure it. We fed a long pole into it. It got swept away. Then we had a bale of rope, a thousand yards of it. We tied a weight to the end and let it spool through this door. It all went. Something snatched at it, and the rope got sucked through. The space through this door is infinite, is our best guess. As infinite as time.”
“Stop it,” said Oliver. His body was vibrating, but with rage or fear Ripley could not tell.
“You can move in the stream of time,” Christopher went on. “You can go anywhere in history—back to before any of us were even here on earth. Or to a point when we could all be gone. All life on earth.”
Oliver squeezed his eyes shut. “Stop it.”
Christopher closed the door. Ripley had never been so happy to see a door shut in her life.
“It’s closed, Mr. Cooke.”
Oliver cracked one eyelid. He let out a shaky breath.
Nobody spoke. Ripley’s mind was reeling. It couldn’t be. It made no sense. Time didn’t work that way. Hours and minutes and days and years weren’t liquid, you couldn’t see them or swim through them.
They could hear the milk—they could hear time—slapping rhythmically against the door. It sounded like a heartbeat.
“You say you’ve put poles and rope in there,” said Ripley. “Have you ever put a …”
“A person?” Christopher shook his head. “It’s incredibly dangerous to let people loose in time. Changes to the past can create terrible ripples in the present or future. So no, nobody has stepped through that door.”
“Not yet,” said Jake. “Isn’t that what you mean?”
Christopher nodded. “Not yet.”
Jake angled his chair so that he faced Ripley, Oliver, and Gavin.
He said: “So. Who wants to go swimming?”