Hopper House (The Jenkins Cycle Book 3) (6 page)

T
he next day
, Rose got up before I did. When I arrived downstairs, it was to the scene of a hearty breakfast in the making.

“Morning,” I said.

“You too,” she said, mixing pancake batter in a bowl. “Have a seat.”

Impulsively, I came around and tried to give her a kiss on the cheek. Rose turned away.

Still mixing, she said, “About that. Um … I’m sorry, Dan. You’re a nice guy and all, but let’s just be friends, okay?”

Wow
…

Somehow, after all I’d been through, the rejection still stung.

Time to dust off the ol’ teflon exterior.

“Does that mean my fishing privileges have been restored?”

Rose didn’t reply. She finished the pancakes, stacked them up high, and sat down across the table from me.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I said, reaching for the syrup.

“Nope.”

That was surprising, considering the way she’d demolished her meal yesterday at the hotel.

“You said someone knows who you are,” Rose said quietly. “Someone who isn’t drifting, like us. You said he was a pain in the ass.”

“A minister I know. What about him?”

She watched my face intently. “Is he a close friend?”

A good question. “Yeah, I suppose. It’s hard to define.”

“Tell me more about him.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know more about you if we’re going to be friends.” She smiled mechanically, as if remembering to be friendly. “Personal stuff.”

It felt odd, her sudden interest in my experiences. Until now, she’d masterfully deflected my every attempt to learn more about her and others like us. Then came that secret phone call—with me as the topic—and lo and behold, meaningful conversation was back on the table again. She didn’t seem happy about it, either. Or rather, she didn’t seem happy
in general
. Gone was the Devil-may-care Rose who’d taken Sam the comedian lawyer down a peg and sent him packing. Her eyes had been happy then, sparkling with bratty fun. Now it seemed as if any moment they’d spill over in tears. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell why.

I took another bite of my pancakes, washed it down with milk, and said, “It was my strangest ride ever …
hop
ever. Whatever you call it.”

Rose nodded, not smiling at my word choice. The giggle factor, it seemed, had finally worn off.

I told her the story of my ride as Nate Cantrell, the overly good-looking lotto winner and his gold-digging fiancée, Erika.

When I mentioned how Nate had been a good guy, Rose said, “I almost never get good ones. When that happens, I never know what to do.” A second later, she added, “But I don’t kill them.”

“What do you do when they’re monsters?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said in a tight voice. “Finish what you were saying.”

I summarized the rest: how the minister realized what I was by touching me, and how he could kick me out if he wanted to.

“Then what happened?” Rose said, leaning forward. “With the minister, not the woman.”

“He said he was interested in learning about me—sort of like you, right now.”

Rose blanked her face, not giving an inch.

“I wrote something up and sent it to him in an email. About my experiences.”

“What, like an essay? Do you still have it? Can I see it?”

“Bigger than an essay.”

“I’d love to read it sometime.”

There were so many questions I had about my strange cycle of life and death. But every time I’d tried asking her, she’d shut me down or deflected the question. How old was she? What was
her
Great Wherever like? Had she ever kicked herself out on purpose, the way I’d once done? And probably the most important question: had she also committed suicide? Deep down, I still harbored this idea I was being punished for that.

“If I let you read what I sent him,” I said, “would you finally open up to me a little?”

Rose stared at me, biting her lip.

“Yes,” she said. A moment later, she nodded as if finalizing her decision. “Deal.”

After breakfast, I offered to help with the dishes but she told me not to bother. Honestly, I was happy to get out. Her sudden mood shifts were weirding me out a little.

There was paper in the computer room stacked in a drawer. The top page was yellow with age, but the ones underneath were all white. Hopefully the printer ink hadn’t dried out.

I logged into my account and found that email I’d sent the minister all those years ago.

Clicking the print icon, I said, “Take that, Gutenberg.”

T
hirty minutes later
, I carried the stack of freshly printed pages downstairs and listened for signs of activity. The house was quiet.

I put the story on the kitchen counter where Rose could find it, then stepped out on the back porch for a look around. Scrub vegetation and the odd cotton plant grew behind the house for as far as I could see. In the distance, a slight rise in the property blocked my vision. Just barely, I caught a glimpse of Rose before she dropped out of sight.

The fishing pole from yesterday was still there.

“Hmm,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Something’s not fishy.”

Beyond the gate, the grass was a high mix of green and gold. Other than a narrow path describing Rose’s passage, the overgrown landscape appeared untouched. Careful not to step in a hole, I followed the path. A hundred yards in and the ground grew firmer, less grassy, then rocky as I crested the hill. Off to the right, the way looked easier. In the distance, a creek widened into a small pond, then back again before continuing on through the thick tangle of vegetation.

To my left, a curious sight.

“Roses,” I said.

There, in the center of all this fallow farmland, was an island of rose bushes growing out of a low hill, maybe a hundred feet wide and ten feet high.

Rose had nearly reached it. I almost called to her, but then she passed into the thick growth and out of sight.

I gaped at the strange formation in front of me. The base of the hill was barricaded by a ring of boulders, resembling something druidic. As I passed the barrier, I noticed the area inside was treacherous with more large rocks and thorny rosebush branches. The way seemed impassible, and I didn’t think I’d entered the same place she had.

Backtracking out, I figured I knew what this was.

When farmers clear land, they have to do something with the rocks. Usually they build fences or even houses from them. Whoever had farmed here simply piled them in the middle like this and turned the whole thing into a wild and prickly garden. Very pretty, and it smelled great.

A light breeze brushed up, and the floral sweetness was replaced by the pungent stench of tobacco smoke.

“Why are you following me?” Rose said from off to my left.

I turned and saw her standing ten feet away at the base of a small boulder that had tumbled farther out from the others.

“Following you? Is that what you think?” I gave a hearty laugh. Oh the absurdity. “I was going for a stroll. Then I saw this big
thing
out here. Did you plant these roses?”

She smiled briefly and took a drag. “Because of my name, you mean?”

“You said the house was yours. And you still haven’t told me how old you are, or how you—”

“They’ve
always
been here,” she said angrily. “And look, I don’t mean to be bossy or anything, but this is my special place. You can go fishing if you want, or pick peaches back near the road, but no one’s allowed here.”

“What about the other guests?” I said.

“The other…?” Her eyes widened, and she covered her mouth like I’d said something funny. “Oh.
Them
. All they do is party and sleep.”

I thought about how to proceed. “So what’s with all the secrets? Is it just you being weird, or something else? There are things I know that you don’t. We could help each other.”

Rose snorted. “And what do you know?”

“For one thing, the Great Whomever listens when we give him grief.”

“Aliens,” she said automatically. “What do you mean?”

Quickly, I recounted how I’d been trapped in the body of Ernest Prescott, the horror writer. How I told the Great Whomever I’d never come back if he didn’t get me out of that wheelchair. Then I told her about the thousand and one deaths I’d had before landing in the body of one of Ernest’s bodyguards.

“Scheherazade smokestack of death?” she said with a smirk.

“That’s how I think of it. Like a warning. Ever had anything like that happen?”

Rose went quiet for a moment, then her expression became coy. “Come on, Dan, may as well show you my fuzzy peaches.”

As usual, she’d changed the subject. I considered pressing her for more, but she was already walking.

Together, we navigated an overgrown path that led to a stand of trees near the road. There hadn’t been many cars that I could see, but there had been a few, and I worried someone might recognize us from our pictures on the news.

The trees were spaced about thirty feet apart. Fallen peaches lay strewn between them, and the upper branches were laden with fruit.

“They’re ripe,” Rose said, reaching down to pick one up. She wiped it off on her shirt, looked at it closely, then took a bite.

I bent down, searching for a good one.

“Gotta find one with no worms,” she said.

Worms?

Curling my lip, I lifted my gaze upward. There was a low-hanging branch with a big fat peach on the end, and that’s the one I reached for. I smiled at the memory of a ride where I’d sat through a board meeting with a CEO who wouldn’t stop talking about low-hanging fruit, how that’s what we all needed to be reaching for. If he could see me now, he’d be so impressed.

“Nice find,” Rose said. “The locals sneak onto the property sometimes and clean out the easy-to-reach ones. I don’t mind. Least someone’s eating them.”

She kept looking for worm-free peaches on the ground, not finding many good ones, while I tried for the fat ones higher up with about as much luck.

“Come here,” she said.

I did.

“Bend down.”

I bent down.

Rose climbed on my back and said, “Piggyback works best. You’re so tall.”

I straightened unsteadily to my full height. Rose was light and I was strong, and we worked a system where she’d pick a peach, hand it down, and I’d toss it lightly onto a peach-free section of springy grass. Together we pulled down maybe twenty of the best ones. The locals would be devastated.

“Hey, be careful,” she said when I stumbled over a peach that had fallen from her jostling.

A second later, I slipped again. Rose screamed, grabbed a branch, and I broke my fall by pulling her down on top of me.

I started to apologize, but her shoulder was in my mouth. She twisted in my arms, but didn’t get up. Her face hovered inches from mine, her gaze steady and unblinking, and her breath was…

“Just peachy,” she said and kissed me.

We made love under the trees, trusting the low scrub along the fence to hide us from the road. I didn’t think she cared, but it takes a lot for me to completely shake off my natural shyness. Afterward, I leaned back against one of the trees with Rose in my arms.

Though I didn’t know her very well—not at all, really—somewhere between the hotel, the house, and the way her fingers traced tiny circles on the back of my hand, I found myself caring for her.

R
ose refused
to talk about her past, and soon I stopped asking. She still insisted we were just friends, and wouldn’t let me sleep in the room with her at night.

Other than that, the days that followed were comfortable and predictable. We’d start the morning late, crouched around our breakfast plates, alternating who cooked based on whoever made it to the kitchen first. Afterward, I’d check the news for developments in the
Rachael Anderson Kidnapping
, as the changing story was now being billed. If the weather wasn’t rainy or too hot, we’d walk around the massive property, sometimes hand-in-hand, sometimes talking about little things like books and movies. Then we’d skinny dip in the pond and dare each other to touch the cold slimy bottom.

One of the best ways to get someone to talk about themselves, I’ve learned, is for me to talk about
myself
. Rose seemed impervious to that, but she did seem interested in my tale. I even caught her smiling once or twice as she read my story each evening. While she read, I’d watch her face for any sign she was amused or moved or especially interested in something, always hoping she’d ask for clarification on some detail or reveal some esoteric hopper lore. She never did.

A week passed and her smiles came less frequently. The same with the skinny-dipping and anything to do with nakedness, and talking pretty much stopped altogether. I’d ask, “Are you sure you’re all right?” and she’d say, “I’m fine,” or sometimes, “Would you stop asking me that?”

After finishing my story, Rose reneged on her promise to answer my questions. She also refused to let me wander the property alone—something I found out when I invited her to go look at the stars. At first, she declined. Then, when I set out on my own, she leapt to her feet and followed along. My guess was she didn’t want me looking at the rocky rose garden thing.

By now, given our huge appetites, the pantry had gotten very low, and we were surviving mostly on fish, peaches, and pancakes with no syrup. Both our faces were all over the news, with leads coming in all the time: new information, new insights, panels of experts, biographies, psychological profiling, interviews with friends and family for Rachael, and shoved-away cameras and “no comment!” from Lenny and his gang as they made their way in and out of the pizza place. Famous as we were, there was no way either of us could go down to that general store to refresh our dwindling supplies. Clearly, the woman working there hadn’t remembered my face or we would have been arrested by now. Or maybe she didn’t watch the news. A stroke of luck however you looked at it, but we couldn’t risk it twice.

L
ate one afternoon
, in the middle of a movie I’d already seen, but Rose hadn’t, I got kicked.

Rose, who was standing, gaped at me in surprise. Then, without warning, her eyes flashed black, the same way they had in that meeting hall back at the hotel—as if darkness were light, and light had turned to shadow.

“Dammit,” she said a few seconds later, grabbing a nearby chair for support.

“Were you kicked too?” I said.

From our conversations, I’d deduced that hoppers
hopped
and their rides were
skins
, but we both used the term
kick
to describe the sneeze-like effect that beamed us back to our spaceships.

Rose glared at me.

“Now what did I do?” I said.

“You reset my clock, that’s what! I was supposed to have at least three more days.”

I shrugged. “Sometimes it varies.”

“This isn’t happening,” she said, shaking her head. “You were supposed to kick
first
. You just want to snoop around!”

Rose stormed from the room, shedding the first tears I’d seen from her.

I followed her upstairs.

“Leave me alone!” she yelled when I got to her room.

“Rose, tell me what’s going on,” I said through the locked door, listening but not hearing anything. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay? I’m still not convinced about Rachael.”

Sensitive guy that I was.

Again, no answer. I stood there five minutes telling her in various ways how everything was okay, that I was sorry, how the experts said it was good to talk about your problems, blah blah blah, but she didn’t answer.

“Rose, please,” I said. “If you don’t open up, I’ll bust it in. I know it’s your house and all, but—”

The door swung open and Rose looked out. “
What?
”

I blinked in surprise. “Can we talk about what just happened? You said something about your clock.”

“I’ll be down later,” she said. “Just leave me alone for now. Please.”

Before I could reply, she shut the door.

Torn between a desire to break it down and giving her space, I eventually went back downstairs.

The rest of my day was spent pacing the main floor and listening for signs of life upstairs. Once, I thought I heard her walking around, and at first I felt relieved—then worried she’d decided to take a bath with an electric appliance. The lights never fluttered, and I eventually turned my mind to that weird blackness from her eyes, our mutual kicks, and her strange pronouncement that I’d reset her clock.

At precisely 6 p.m., I called up the stairs: “Do you want me to make dinner?”

I’d yelled up earlier to see if she wanted a snack, but she hadn’t responded. Surely she’d have to reply this time.

Rose did something better—she came down wearing the same outfit from the day we’d fled the hotel: tight leather skirt, sleeveless black top, slippery smooth nylons, and skyscraper pumps. She’d also done up her hair and applied makeup.

I smiled in appreciation. “What’s the occasion?”

“It’s Sunday,” she said. “I always dress nice on Sunday.”

“What happened last Sunday?”

“Are you saying I looked bad?”

“No, just … never mind. I didn’t cook. I wasn’t sure if you—”

“Leave that to me.”

“There’s not much left,” I said as she shooed me out.

Less than five minutes later, she called me back in for our feast. For me: Ritz crackers, the last piece of bread with a thick spread of peanut butter, and a chunk of fish. Rose had crackers smeared with peanut butter.

“That’s all you want?” I said.

“Watching my figure,” she said, and poured me the last batch of purple Kool-Aid.

For our entire stay, she’d hogged the grape something fierce, leaving me with the cherry flavored stuff. Maybe sharing was her way of apologizing. I’d have to give her more stuff to apologize for.

“Wow,” I said after a sip. “Delicious.”

“It’s my favorite
,
” she said. “I’m sorry, Dan. I promised to answer your questions and didn’t. So go ahead.”

I took a sip to cover my surprise. If I acted too excited, I’d spook her. I’d have to start small, work my way up.

“Do you really think it’s aliens?”

“Mostly.”

Now to spring it on her.

“Did you commit suicide?”

Rose frowned. “Ask something else or I’m going back upstairs.”

“Okay,” I said, hands raised for calm. “Sorry. How long have you been coming back?”

“Fifty-five years.”

I pursed my lips in a silent whistle. “Wow. I’ve only been doing this for … well, you know from my story. So what, you stay here every time you land in Georgia?”

“I
always
land in Georgia,” she said bitterly. “Hoppers only appear in places they’ve been before they died, within a hundred miles or so. Back then, people around here didn’t travel much, including me.”

I stared at her in astonishment. “Are you serious? But that would mean…”

“How many places do you show up?” Rose said.

Every year, until I’d left for college, my family would pile into an RV and travel the country: up and down both coasts and every state in the middle. If what she said was true, no wonder I’d never noticed.

“Lots of places,” I said. “Any place I show up, my family took me there first. If you’re right, that explains why I never had a ride in Hawaii or a different country.” I shook my head. “All this time and I never realized it. Where did you learn this?”

“From others like us. We talk. Someone figured it out.”

“How often do you run into them? Pretty rare, right? If you can only tell by the weird special effects.”

“We have ways of finding each other,” she said in a low voice, “and I’m not comfortable with this line of questioning.”

I nodded. “That’s fine—not trying to make anyone uncomfortable. Here’s an easy one: do you also have a super memory? Of everything you ever—”

“Yes,” she said.

“Three weeks, super memory, hundred miles, got it. And when you get kicked, do you go to the Great Wherever?”

“I told you when we met. It’s a stasis chamber.”

“Right,” I said. “Stasis chamber. How silly of me.”

“That it?” she said. The mood in the room had definitely turned defensive.

I shook my head. “What did you mean when you said your clock got reset?”

Rose said, “Sometimes that happens, but only with good friends. Now we’ll arrive at the same time, wherever we are, and we’ll kick at the same time, too. Most hoppers come and go randomly, but we’re now perfectly in sync.” She held up a hand, forestalling me. “By the way: you should keep what you said about hopping directly into other skins to yourself. If you meet other hoppers, I mean. They either won’t believe you, or they’ll tell someone they shouldn’t.”

“And who would that be?”

Rose shook her head and stared at her plate of untouched crackers. Yep, I was losing her.

“Just one more question,” I said in my best Columbo. “About Rachael. I know you said she’s not a good person. Are you absolutely certain about that? Without a doubt?”

“Yes, for the thousandth time
yes
. Quit thinking with your cock, Dan. You should know by now pretty doesn’t mean shit.”

“Sorry, okay? I wouldn’t be so suspicious if you’d been up front with me. Why all the secrets?”

In a small voice, she said, “Because I like you.”

I laughed. “And how is that a bad thing?”

“Because,” she said, “I don’t think you’d like
me
. Not if you knew me. Your ice is melting.”

Blinking, I looked in my cup. She was right: my ice
was
melting. I took another sip. We sat there together, neither of us talking. I liked that she liked me. She was weird, obviously a mess, but no one was perfect.

I took another sip.

The room sure was hot. I wondered if the air conditioning was working. What a pain that would be: no food, no air conditioning, skinny-dipping privileges revoked.

Trying to think of a good question, I went for another sip, but my cup runneth out. That was the last packet of purple Kool-Aid, too.

I licked my lips, dizzy from the heat. “Do you … always come here? I can … visit you … now that we’re … same time.”

Very
dizzy.

“You won’t want to.”

She came around to catch me, but I slipped through her fingers and crashed to the floor.

Before blacking out, I said, “Sheggle buggle ook…”