Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1) (5 page)

A short distance up the street Oliver
could see another man on the sidewalk. He must have been walking, but had
stopped in midstride, one foot stuck barely an inch above the ground. Just
behind him Oliver could see a letter carrier stooping down to open a mailbox,
his key inserted halfway into the lock but not going any further. Everyone he
could see was as still as a mannequin, frozen in a bizarre approximation of everyday
life.

It wasn’t just the people, Oliver
realized.
Nothing
was moving. A man to his left had been out walking his
dog, but the dog was just as still now as the man. Just in front of him Oliver
could see a leaf which had been in the process of falling from a tree. It had
stopped in mid-air. Oliver took a step forward, so close that he could have
kissed it if he’d wanted to, then he cautiously reached up and tried to pluck
it out of the air. He felt it resist for a moment, as if the leaf were stuck in
molasses, and then it came free. He stared at it in his hand. It was just an
ordinary leaf. What was going on here?

“What on earth?” he asked aloud. His
voice sounded oddly resonant. He quickly realized it was because nothing else
in the neighborhood was making a sound. The entire world around him was deathly
silent.

“It’s like walking into a painting,”
Tyler said from behind him. Oliver nearly jumped in surprise. The other man was
standing a few feet away, looking up at a bird frozen in mid-flight above them.
“It’s wild, isn’t it?”

“What is this?” Oliver asked in
wonderment.

“Oh, I can’t tell you exactly,” Tyler
admitted. “I asked Artemis once and she tried to explain it to me, but
theoretical physics is way outside my area.”

“But you’re doing this? Controlling
it?” 

“Oh, no. That’s way beyond our
abilities, believe me. You see that house?” he pointed at the building they had
just left. “It exists at a single fixed point in time. From its perspective the
outside world never moves and never changes. So we use it as a safe house. It’s
a great place to hide for a while.”

“A fixed point in time?” Oliver asked.
“So…is this the past? Or the future?” Oliver was beginning to think he’d need a
physics textbook to understand all of this. Or possibly some LSD.

“No, we’re still in the same time we
left. Inside the house it’s the past. Or the future. I’m not actually sure
when
the house is. But out here, everything is back to normal.”

“This isn’t normal,” Oliver said,
looking around. “Nothing is moving.” A frightening thought occurred to him.
“Wait, are we stuck like this?”

“No. Now that you’re outside you’ll
catch up to the rest of the universe. Or it will catch up to you. I don’t know.
It just takes a minute, though. There, see?” He pointed to the street.

Oliver looked. The cars he had been so
fascinated by earlier were beginning to move. They were moving very slowly, but
it was still movement none the same. As he watched, they slowly began to speed
up. It was like seeing a movie that had been playing in slow-motion, but was
slowly winding up to the correct speed.

“Unbelievable,” Oliver said.

“Yeah. This kind of thing, you get used
to it,” Tyler shrugged. “Look, I’m not going to force you, but would you please
come back in and listen to what Artemis has to say? I know none of us has much
of a bedside manner, but we’re actually trying to help you out here.”

Oliver thought about it. One of two
things was certain. Either he was losing his mind, or something truly strange
was really happening, something that went well beyond anything he could
understand without help. These people were very, very odd, and for all he knew
they really were part of a cult, but they couldn’t make time stop. And they
were the only people here offering to help him.

“I’ll come inside,” Oliver said. He looked
past Tyler, only to see the house he had just come from was gone. Only an empty
lot stood there now. 

“It’s still there,” Tyler said,
anticipating Oliver’s next question. “It’s back to normal out here, so you
can’t see it anymore.” Indeed, Oliver could see that things outside had
returned to the way they had been before. The cars in the street were once
again moving at normal speeds, and the dog walker had just passed by them with
no indication that he had ever seen anything amiss.

“Why not?” Oliver asked.

“Because it doesn’t exist in this
timeline,” Tyler explained. “It hasn’t been built yet. Or it has already been
torn down. Or maybe it was never built here at all.” He frowned and scratched
his head.  “God, I hate this time stuff. Sometimes I expect to come out of
there and run straight into a pack of dinosaurs.”

Oliver wondered if that were possible.
“How do we get back inside, then?”

“The way this works,” Tyler started to
explain, “no, that’s not it. Let me think. Okay. See,
you
exist in
its
timeline now. Even though it doesn’t exist for the rest of the world, you’ll be
able to see it if you can remember that it’s there. Think about it for a
minute. Do you remember the house being there?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of house was it?”

Oliver thought it over. “I don’t know
anything about architecture,” he said finally. “It was grey. It had two
stories.”

“Okay, that should be enough. Can you
remember what it looked like, in your mind?”

“Yeah.”

“Look for it now.”

Oliver looked at the empty lot again,
fully expecting to see nothing. But now the odd grey house stood there again.
Oliver felt a chill. He had a feeling that somehow the house had been there
since the beginning of time, and would remain there until time’s end.

“There you go,” said Tyler. “Let’s go
inside.”

Oliver hesitated, but he’d come this
far. What did he have to lose now? He followed Tyler up the walkway and into
the house.

Artemis was still seated in the living
room, not having moved from her chair. She was sipping her tea thoughtfully. “I
trust now we can talk without you bolting for the door?”

“We can talk,” Oliver said.

“Excellent. Do have one of Tyler’s
muffins. They’re quite good, and by now you must know that if we wanted to harm
you, we wouldn’t need to resort to poison.”

She had a point, Oliver thought. He took
a muffin from the table and poured himself a cup of tea, then returned to his
chair and sat down facing the little girl. A tentative bite was enough for him
to tell that the muffin he’d taken was both moist and delicious. “Oh!” he said.
“These really are good.”

Tyler beamed. “I told you,” Artemis
said.

Chapter 7

“So,” Oliver began. “Who
exactly are you people?” A thought suddenly occurred to him, one that would
have seemed ludicrous as recently as fifteen minutes ago, but given the
circumstances now seemed at least somewhat plausible. “Of course. You’re time
travelers. From the future?”

Tyler laughed out loud and Oliver
thought he saw a hint of a smile on the little girl’s face. “No, Mr. Jones, we
are not. Are you, by any chance?”

“No.” Oliver was a bit disappointed. It
had been an interesting idea. When he’d been younger he’d been fascinated by
time travel stories and old
Doctor Who
episodes.

“I see,” Artemis said. “It might have
helped to answer some questions if you were, but I was fairly certain you were
not. I might return to my earlier question…”

“What am I?”

“Yes,” she continued. “But I suspect
that you yourself do not know the answer.”

“Why do you keep asking me that?” Oliver
asked.

“Because you made it onto Mr. Teasdale’s
target list,” the girl explained. “That virtually guarantees that there’s
something special about you.”

“Because an assassin came after me?”

“That would be mundane. Assassins kill
people all the time, as I understand it. But Mr. Teasdale is something of a specialist,
you see. Only the more exotic targets are of any interest to him. He wouldn’t
accept a contract for anything less.”

“Oh.”

“So what is it that makes you exotic,
Mr. Jones?”

“Nothing.” Oliver shrugged, genuinely
stumped. “I’m not exotic. I’m just some guy. I’m boring.”

“At least part of that is true,” Artemis
nodded. “You are, in fact, extremely boring.  Tyler?”

Tyler went into the kitchen and emerged
with a thin manila folder. He handed it to Artemis, who opened it on her lap
and looked through the contents.

“What is that?” Oliver asked.

“Your file.”

“You people have a file on me?”

“We did do our research, of course,”
Artemis said. “Although I must admit your file is unusually thin.” She thumbed
through the pages. “Dead-end job. No intimate relationships. No friends.”

“I have friends,” Oliver protested.

“You have people you know,” Artemis
noted. “You don’t have friends.”

Oliver opened his mouth, but then shut
it again. He didn’t have a good comeback for that.

“You work, eat, and sleep.” She looked
up at him. “Am I missing anything?  You don’t even appear to have a hobby.”

Oliver didn’t care for her tone, but he
didn’t have anything to say in his defense. He wished he had signed up for that
cooking class he had been thinking about taking. That would have shown her.

“There
is
something strange about
you,” Artemis continued. “I’m sure of that.” She studied his face for a moment,
but then shook her head. “I can’t tell what it is. You look like…” she trailed
off.

“Like what?” Oliver asked.

“Like someone who does not fit into this
world,” Artemis said.

Oliver blinked. “What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Are you psychic at all?” Tyler asked
suddenly.

“Psychic? Are you saying psychics are
real?” Oliver started to smirk, thinking of late-night infomercials he’d seen,
but Tyler just nodded at him. “Oh. You were serious. No, I’m not psychic.”

“An alien?”

“You’re joking now.”

“He’s not,” Artemis said, “although that
would be a little far-fetched.”

“I’m not an alien.” Oliver said,
annoyed.

“He could be an alien and not know it,”
Tyler said to Artemis.

“I’m not a damn alien!”

“Cyborg?” asked Tyler.

“There aren’t any cyborgs,” Artemis told
him.

“Not anymore,” said Sally from the
doorway. Oliver had to stifle a gasp. He hadn’t heard the door opening or her coming
inside.

“Not anymore,” Artemis repeated quietly.

Oliver thought he heard regret in the
little girl’s voice. “What happened to the cyborgs?” he asked.  Then he
pondered how insane that question sounded.

“I killed them,” Sally said simply.

“Oh,” Oliver said. That wasn’t exactly
what he had expected to hear. Of course, a minute ago he wouldn’t have expected
to hear that there had
ever
been cyborgs.

“We’re getting off the subject,” Artemis
said. “Is there anything strange in your life you can think of that defies an
easy explanation? Odd coincidences? Anything that happened that seemed too
good, or too bad, to be true? Prophetic dreams?”

“I don’t dream,” Oliver said.

“You…” Artemis blinked in surprise. “You
what?”

“I don’t dream,” Oliver repeated. “I
never have.”

“You probably have dreams and just don’t
remember them,” Tyler suggested.

“No, I’ve never dreamed. I’m sure of
it.” For as long as he’d lived, Oliver had never had a dream.  He wasn’t sure
he was missing anything. Given the state of his life, any dreams he had were
bound to be pretty dull.

Artemis mulled that over. “Interesting,
but not symptomatic of anything I can think of. Except perhaps brain damage.”

“I don’t have brain damage,” Oliver
said.

“Then what is it that separates you from
any other lonely, single stock analyst with no friends?”

Oliver opened his mouth to say something
rude, but suddenly stopped. He had just remembered something.

Artemis saw it on his face. “What?” She
leaned forward, pointing her index finger at him. “What did you think of just
now?”

Oliver didn’t want to say it out loud.
“It’s nothing. Just something I imagined.”

“Say it!” the little girl warned.

Oliver sighed. This had already been the
strangest conversation of his life. What did he have to lose? “A cat talked to
me,” he admitted.

Sally snorted in derision and Tyler
looked away. Oliver could tell he was trying not to grin. “A cat talked to
you,” Artemis repeated.