In Between
I KILLED MY MOTHER IN 1864.
She was the first person I ever killed. She’d been fucking a hired hand in my father’s barn while my father was away fighting the Rebs and I slit her throat with my fishing knife, utilizing the darkness and plain surprise to my advantage. I was a few months from my eleventh year, slightly built for my age, and no one suspected I could use a knife so well. The hired hand, no older than a score or so, younger than Mother by a good decade, could not react fast enough. My blade slipped between his ribs and he fell back on top of Mother, but differently than he’d been on top of her earlier, while I’d spied from the haymow.
Dredd never guessed the truth. I told him Mother was sick and died in her sleep. I’d buried her under the oak tree out beyond the house by the time Dredd woke that humid morning, a precursor to a sweltering July day. I wanted to tell him what I’d really done, how I’d killed two people without either of them uttering a sound, how I’d hauled their wilted bodies in the wheelbarrow in which our father hauled dead pigs, depositing them into the ground in one hole it had taken me almost until dawn to dig. How the pit was deep but not quite long enough, and the bodies made shapes like the letter C once I’d rolled them in it. How I’d said, Sleep tight, before I’d shoveled the earth back over them.
But of course I wasn’t stupid enough to let the pride of my accomplishment override basic common sense. Instead, I told Dredd to make a wooden cross for Mother. With the War on, no one made a fuss over one more grave. No one would ever know two bodies filled it, unless I allowed them to know. Fannie Rawley did not discover Mother was dead until she rode over in the flatbed wagon, along with Grant and Miles, to visit, the Wednesday next.
She said, For the love of all that’s holy, why did you not ride to us with the news, Fallon? You poor boys. Oh, you poor little boys. And she forced us back to the Rawleys’ homestead with her for the remainder of that summer.
Ma was sick, Dredd kept saying. She was fevered.
Dredd believed everything I ever told him.
The first time I leaped it was utterly inadvertent, and I woke with the skin peeling from my face under the blazing midmorning sun. I leaped only a week into the future that time, though it took time to make sense of where I was. Of when I was. The why of it I did not attempt to understand, at least not back then.
It’s because you’re special, was my first thought. More capable, more intelligent, more powerful than others.
I had tried for over a decade to manage my leaps, all without success. At times I was only allowed a few minutes before being whisked back to the past. The most I’d been allowed was a full three days in Chicago in 2013, which I used to my extreme advantage. I kept words and numbers and facts catalogued in my mind, the only storage facility I trusted. I made it my sole purpose in life to ensure the Yancy family continued to increase its wealth and subsequent power. I was determined we would never again know the humiliation we’d faced after my father’s public disgrace in 1868.
But still, I could not leap if I tried to leap, which aggravated me into murderous states of rage. The leaping happened spontaneously and there was no pattern other than that I seemed drawn to the early decades of the twenty-first century. The first time I’d leaped so far through time I’d gaped like a halfwit, overwhelmed by the dazzle of a world far removed from the nineteenth century in which I’d been raised in near-poverty. I would do anything, I understood, to remain in the twenty-first century indeterminately. But it seemed my true purpose was to work at securing my family’s holdings in the place I returned faithfully after every leap, the timeline to which I’d been born in 1853, and where I spent most of my days.
And I was wildly successful. I learned in my leaps of railroad stocks, gold bonds, silver bonds. Land. Real estate. Stock market dabbling. I retained tidbits from each and every leap, returning with new information every time, aided in part by my descendants. Derrick Yancy was T.K.’s only child. I officially met him in 1993, when I founded Capital Overland as ‘Franklin Yancy.’ Derrick was nine years old then and I was already well-acquainted with his father, T.K., who had learned quickly to trust me, mainly because I knew everything about him and everything which had led to his vast fortune. Together we’d created Franklin, passing him off as an older brother, a son T.K. had fathered before his first marriage. To Derrick I was like a magician, appearing intermittently and at a variety of ages, a man his own father called ‘son.’
Through T.K., I formed a remote business relationship with Ronald Turnbull; the alliance between our families was old and valuable. Very occasionally I fucked Ron’s whore wife, Christina, a woman addicted to the thrill of power, which I could appreciate. Despite her willingness to spread her skilled legs I was not anxious to see her again, as during my last visit I had disappeared from her private bathroom, still reeking of her perfume; explaining this would be an annoyance, and would require precision. Though she knew everything her husband did, illegal or otherwise, Christina had never guessed the truth about my abilities and I meant to keep it that way. It became quickly obvious why I’d been dragged from the luxury of her downtown condo and deposited back into the nineteenth century.
Dredd’s cunt wife had gone missing, and though I despised the sharp-eyed bitch, Patricia Biddeford remained necessary to my plans, in that her presence was required in order to produce an heir. Dredd’s purpose was linked to this, of course; he would father this heir and continue the family line. Retrieving Dredd’s wife involved a journey to Howardsville – and how I fucking hated being reduced to travel by horseback when I carried the knowledge of cars and jets – even so, I had never dared passage in an aircraft, uncertain whether I would survive an inadvertent leap while my body was suspended miles above the earth.
And as it turned out, this latest leap had been my last since the woman named Ruthann Rawley, a woman whose surname I’d understood to be Davis, fractured my arm in my passenger car. If she had been lying about knowing my time of death, she bore impressive skills; I could not determine if the statement was false, an unplanned act of desperation, or not – she had caught me off guard, a singular rarity. Something in her eyes led me to believe she was serious, and I trusted my own instincts above all else. I recognized she was both misplaced in time and had information I required – which was why I’d let her live.
But she’s dead now. The moment you force answers from her, she’s fucking dead, I reassured myself, up and pacing for the countless time, keeping my broken arm close to my ribs. It hurt, but I’d borne worse injury; the last man who’d physically harmed me later died in agony, at my hands. Ruthann meant to kill me that night; the intent was unmistakable in her eyes, and it was this act which sent me to Between.
Several times my leaps led to Between and each of those times occurred when my life was endangered. Between was the name I’d assigned it, a place perhaps best likened to a Catholic’s idea of purgatory, as time seemed not to exist in any form here, a hollow space cloaked in vague shadows. It was like trying to see objects through a fogged window; the more closely I looked, the denser the murk. Sounds were muffled as though plugs dammed up my ears, even that of my own voice. Indeed, all my senses were muted in Between.
When I returned from what seemed mere minutes in Between, weeks or even months might have passed in the real world – the world outside Between, that is, as I had no idea where Between actually existed. I could walk for miles here and go nowhere; my footfalls made no sound. I had never encountered another person, nor as much as another object. It seemed to be a holding place and I disliked admitting to any weakness – but Between was a disarming void, a prison of sorts. And yet, it offered protection. While in Between, I planned. I paced and I planned, and minutes would tick past on the stopwatch within my head. Departure was unfailingly abrupt and I was anticipating departure at any second.
Ruthann Rawley was first on my list of people who needed killing. The goddamn Rawley family had worked against mine for too long now; no more would I allow this to happen. I would see to it that Dredd impregnated his wife, Patricia – I had seen this, during a leap – and I would see that Ruthann Davis Rawley met her end. Even better, that those she loved met theirs first, so she could witness what her attempts to thwart me had caused. After all, to my understanding there was no more chance for pain once a person was dead. And I intended to cause her pain, this woman connected with far too many people who worked against my plans – Malcolm Carter and Cole Spicer, both names bitter on my tongue; the goddamn Rawleys.
Once I took care of her family I would go after her lover. Once I’d calmed, once I’d searched my memory, I realized I had seen Ruthann during a leap to 1882; a brief leap, in which I was present at a hanging, and her lover was one of those about to be hung. Another Rawley, of course.
Soon, I promised myself.
And as the thought crossed my mind a small rush of air stirred the hairs on my body, a feeling I had come to anticipate, one that meant I was about to depart Between. I crouched in preparation and was simultaneously struck with an odd childhood memory, of hiding in the tall prairie grass near the shanty in which I’d been raised, hearing my brother’s voice as he counted to ten in a singsong rhythm. In my head, Dredd shouted triumphantly, Ready or not, here I come!
I smiled, repeating the words as Between faded away and I was allowed to leap.
I am coming for you, Ruthann. Ready or not.