The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  Trimble waved a finger at us. “I know you make them keep me here. All that money from that book goes right to this hospital.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said David. “If you knew who took this girl, you’d want to tell us just so we could catch him before he beats your old record. This guy keeps killing and you won’t be the most dangerous man in Ohio anymore. You’ll just be another dumb criminal who got caught.”

  For a second Riley opened his mouth to reply, then snapped it shut. He grinned at David. “You and your tricks,” he said. “So tricksy, David. But good try.”

  * * *

  “He knows who it is. Or at least thinks he does,” David said when we were back in the car.

  “I disagree. I think he’s trying to get a rise out of you. It was a stupid idea. I’m sorry to have pushed you into it.”

  “You don’t know him like I do. He knows something.”

  “If he does, he’s not sharing.”

  David looked out at the country road rolling beneath the Caddy. “She’s dead, you know,” he said after a while. “She has to be by now.”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  Just then David’s cell phone rang. He answered it and spoke for a couple minutes. I didn’t listen to the conversation. I was too preoccupied thinking about Erin McNight’s torture at the hands of her faceless abductor. I’d had my hands on him in 1999. If it hadn’t been for my bad knee … I was far too old to go around the block another time. All that risk, that dangerous trip across the wastelands of Cleveland, for what? Katy’s life. In exchange for how many others? Slowly, I became aware of David’s agitated state. His sentences had become clipped and short. There was concern in his voice. And his eyes were welling up with tears. My first thought was that Tanner had gotten into an accident, and my heart skipped a few beats.

  “What?” I asked as he hung up the phone.

  “That was my … that was our mother,” he said. “Uncle Ira is dying. He put a shotgun in his mouth this morning. He’s on life support at Akron General. And they found a note in his pocket. A letter addressed to us.”

  EPISODE SIXTEEN

  REVELATION

  The journey felt instantaneous. Like going under to get your wisdom teeth removed. One moment I was drifting off to sleep in 2036, the next I was becoming aware of my consciousness again.

  The world was hazy, dark, as if I were looking through thick nylon. I could barely see the control panel set into the egg. The timer attached to my arm beeped like a shrill alarm. I tried to unbuckle the strap with my free hand but discovered my limbs no longer moved. My first thought was that my muscles had atrophied beyond mobility. That would surely mean a slow death inside the egg. I concentrated all my willpower to move that free hand and soon I heard a sickening, tearing sound, the sound of a diaper pulling away from the bottom of a soiled kid who has spent too much time in the sun. I was covered in secretions, a chrysalis made from mucus, semen, shit, blood, urine, wax, mold, hair, tears, old skin, sweat, vomit, and pus. Enshrined. The smell was thick and powerful, even though the scrubbers still churned in their mechanical slots. It smelled something like apples gone to rot over a pile of cow patties, like spoiled cider resting in a forgotten cup inside an outhouse.

  I heaved, but, of course, my stomach was empty. The act of heaving brought with it the realization of an overwhelming hunger and thirst. Hunger unlike anything I’ve experienced. Gnawing hunger, insane hunger.

  I am ashamed at what I did next and can only admit to it because I was unable to control myself. I began to eat my way out of the mess. The thick film tasted like crusted snot, dried blood, like scabs. And not everything was hardened, oh, no. Much remained congealed under layers of caked bile, like some hellish nougat. I devoured the twisted black crisps that were my fingernails; they pried easily away from the fingers. I worked my way out until my upper body was freed enough so that I could unbelt myself from the timer, though my skin remained covered in a sticky black tar.

  The pounding in my temples, that constant drumming of hunger, hunger, hunger, subsided as my body began to digest its leftovers, its first meal in a long damn time. With some effort, I found the switch and turned off the machine. There was a gentle shudder and then silence. I felt below, where my satchel had been placed, but the leather had been swallowed up by a slimy white moss. I cut away at the fungus until I could get at the items inside. There it was, the laser cutter. It felt heavy in my hand. Anxious to breathe fresh air, I switched it on. A bright fountain of high-energy sparks erupted from its nose, crackling like a Tesla coil. I brought the end against the top of the egg and went to work, cutting a slash into the hermetically sealed chamber. There was a POP! and a rush of air as it broke through to the outside. I smelled cedar and grass and water.

  Thirty seconds later, the lid was off.

  I grabbed the lip of the egg with one hand and then the other. I tried to stand but could not feel my legs. I knew I was not paralyzed, however, because when I kicked a foot against the shell I felt pain: dull and distant, but there. It took some time to roll my body over the opening. I crashed to the earth and, if not for the soft bed of nettles, might have broken something. Slowly, inch by inch, I pulled myself up and leaned against a tree, the laser cutter still in my hand. There was a bright flash of torment as a disc in my spine shifted into place. I cried out, “Ahhhhhhnaaaa!” My voice sounded muffled and deep—partially blocked, I figured, by the same black ooze that coated my body.

  Movement out of the corner of my eye. A man stepped from behind a tree. Impossible, I thought. Impossible or not, it was the same man who had tried to stop me from entering the time machine in 2036. I recognized him. Although now the man was barely yet a man. He wore no beard and was still skinny from the casual exercise of the young: fucking and sports. He pointed a gun at me again.

  Who—or what—did he think I was? And then I got it. Suddenly everything made sense. Suddenly that old campfire tale from Camp Ritchie became a horror story all my own; I was the Loveland Frog. Me and all the other me’s who had traveled further down the river of time, blindly chasing their own personal obsessions.

  I tried to tell him to stop, but talking was not easy. The simple effort of pushing air through my voice box was like blowing into a water balloon. All that came out was, “Nahop. Nahhh oppp!”

  And then he shot me. Right in the goddamn knee, blowing apart my patella as if it were a skeet shell. I collapsed to the ground. “You … dumb … motherfucker,” I said, quite clearly—apparently anger was more useful to my numbed body than fear. My sudden English so unnerved the young man, he turned tail and disappeared toward the roadway.

  It was a long way back to Twightwee Road. About half a mile. A long way for someone with barely any muscle mass, longer still for someone who has just been shot in the knee. I thought there was a decent chance I would die there in the woods, dead in the far past, my body picked over by woodland creatures and scattered about the old camp in pieces. I didn’t think I had enough energy to push myself to the road. And I was losing a lot of blood.

  I looked back. The egg from which I had emerged was now wrecked, lying on its side with a hole gouged into its top. There was, I noticed, no other black egg. I had expected to see one. I recalled that demonstration by Tesla. Shouldn’t I be able to see the black egg I had come in, still intact, with me inside traveling backward through time? I couldn’t work out this riddle until much later. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but for some reason its disappearance filled me with optimism.

  Then I heard footsteps, crunching their way toward me with a purpose. That’ll be the young policeman come to finish me off, I thought. Somehow, I could live with that. I had, after all, gone the distance. I had come this far. I had overcome physics. I had given the universe a big, Fuck you! hadn’t I? I could take a little pride in that.

  It was a young man, but not the policeman. He had red hair and a spattering of freckles across his nose, the beginning of a beard along his jawline.

 
“Oh, my God,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “Shhhot,” I said.

  “Is that stuff contagious?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Nnno. Just gr-gross.”

  The young man helped me to my feet and put an arm under one of mine and around my shoulders. “My name is Albert Beachum,” he said. “My boss sent me down here to pick you up.”

  “Who’s your boss?”

  Albert laughed. “I don’t know. Never gave me his name.”

  I was too exhausted to care. He dragged me toward the road. He really was very strong for such a thin teenager.

  By the time we got to Twightwee, I knew I was going to lose consciousness. A large RV was parked on the other side of the road. Albert walked me to it, opened the door, and helped me into a large bed set up inside. He wrapped a bandage tightly around my knee. The bleeding had subsided quite a bit. I think the goop helped seal the wound quicker than blood alone. I felt myself drifting off. Before I fell asleep, I gripped his arm tightly.

  “What?”

  “Bag. In egg.”

  “I’ll get your things,” he said. “No worries.”

  I was asleep before I saw him leave.

  * * *

  It was night when I awoke, the RV speeding north on I-71. We had just passed the Lodi exit, an hour from Cleveland, if that’s where we were heading. The thought of seeing the city alive again lifted my spirits. God, I loved Cleveland in the springtime, the wind whipping off the lakefront, filling the narrow spaces of the city with negative ions and the aroma of freshwater. I sat up in the bed, against the wood-paneled wall. I watched the cars drive by, trying to discern from their design if I had arrived at my correct destination. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” played on the speakers. I felt a sense of unease. By 1999, Nirvana had faded from popularity, if I remembered right.

  “Albert?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What year is it?”

  The boy looked at me in the rearview mirror and quickly decided I wasn’t joking. “It’s 1996. June seventeenth.”

  Somehow I had overshot my target by about three years. That’s what I get for taking a prototype, I thought. Except it wasn’t a prototype, was it? No. There had been hundreds in Tesla’s hangar.

  “Does that disappoint you?”

  “Not really,” I said. I had waited decades for an answer. I could wait four more years. “Where are we going?”

  “To my boss’s place, in Akron.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re disappointed.”

  “I was hoping to see Cleveland.”

  “Well, it’s not going anywhere.”

  I let him believe so. “Who is your boss? I know you don’t know his name, but who is he? What does he do?”

  “I thought you might know.”

  “Nope.”

  “Huh.”

  “Strange job you have.”

  “You have no idea. If you’re feeling up to it, the bathroom is set up for you. Warm shower and everything.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “You smell like my grandpa’s farm when his alpaca caught a blood disease.”

  “I think I can manage. This knee’s going to have to be looked at.”

  “We have a plan.”

  “Of course you do.”

  * * *

  By now you know that Albert’s boss was the Man from Primrose Lane. In hindsight, I should have known, too, but at that time the only answer that made sense was that, at the end of this road, I would find Tesla’s house waiting for me. Somehow, he must have followed me, I figured. Whoever it was, I didn’t really care, because they were obviously nice. They had greeted me with this warm bathroom, they had arranged to have lava soap, tomato juice, chlorine, Palmolive, and even some gasoline which I could use to work the blackness off.

  Once I got going, it really was not so difficult. The bottom layer of funk was mostly a hardened layer of skin—not unlike a cicada’s shell, I noted—that came off in long bunches like peeled sunburn. I sat under the shower until the water ran out, scrubbing the shell off me. When I was finished, I scooped up the mess that clogged the drain and put it in the trash.

  It felt like coming back to myself, like coming home. I felt like a warrior preparing for an epic battle, a gladiator cleansing himself before climbing the stairs to the Colosseum.

  Albert had set out an array of snacks and beverages, of which I partook with gluttony. I should have known then, because it was all my favorite stuff: Coke, Twizzlers, beef jerky, sour cream and onion potato chips, those little caramel creams, fresh plums, even a Taco Bell burrito. Underneath it all was a pack of Marlboros, and that’s when I figured it out. I knew who it was because it was not just any pack of Marlboros, it was my pack, wrinkled and yellowed with age. I was riding in an RV filled with goodies, three years ahead of my intended arrival, going to meet myself. Somewhere, in some other timeline, I had made this journey before and ended up further in the past than 1996. Why? Who was this version of me obsessing about? Certainly not Katy, right?

  Understanding time travel and its ramifications is a bit like going insane. There is a point of no return you must pass before you can accept as fact these things others would call delusions. It’s an uncomfortable line, and one that must be crossed on faith alone. I had jumped over that line when I stepped inside that egg. I knew things would get weird. Just not this weird.

  There was only one thing I could do. Enjoy the ride.

  I lit a cigarette with a match from the tin next to it. It was the second-worst cigarette I’d ever had. And it was wonderful.

  We were nearly to Akron by the time I stumbled out of the bathroom and made my way to the passenger’s seat. I crumpled into the soft leather chair.

  Albert turned his head to look at me and almost lost control of the RV. “Shit!” he said. “Are you guys twins? You told me you didn’t know who my boss was.”

  “I do now,” I said.

  “So, what? Brothers?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he’s my brother.”

  “How long’s it been since you’ve seen him?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t really know a safe answer for that.

  He was quiet for a while but he just couldn’t help himself. Even the best of confidants reach their end. “What was that thing in the woods?”

  “The black egg?”

  “Yeah, that thing. It looked like that spaceship Mork from Ork crashed down in. Is that what it is, a spaceship?”

  I laughed. “Is that what you think we are? Aliens?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s as strange as you are. Are you reading my mind all the time?”

  I sighed. I was already making things worse. “Would your boss like it if you were asking me all of these questions?”

  And he was sober again. Staring intently at the road. “Course not. I got distracted. Sorry.”

  “I’m not … we’re not aliens.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  Albert was a mile down the road before I even got to the front door. It’s a good thing I had remembered to grab my things.

  I was reaching for the knocker when the door opened for me. Even though I had expected it, I was unprepared to see myself in the flesh. He stood there in the doorway, the Man from Primrose Lane, and regarded me with a weary expression of welcome. My head felt tingly, as if it were trying to figure out if this was some joke, or if my soul had been ripped from my body to look back on itself. A sense of vertigo nearly overwhelmed me. I staggered forward, against the threshold, bumping my lame knee against the catch.

  “Come in,” he said.

  If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust, right? I followed him in and he closed the door behind us.

  He offered his hand, covered in a blue and white mitten. “Hello, David.”

  “Hello, David,” I said.

  The Man from Primrose Lane didn’t laugh. He reached into his closet and brought out a new pair of brown and ta
n mittens. “Better put these on,” he said. I did as instructed and followed him into the living room, a high-ceilinged chamber whose windows were obscured by the stacks and shelves of paperback books. The smell of dust and glue and old paper was so powerful I wondered if it could be toxic. I sat on the only chair, set against a tiny desk in the corner, beneath a light. The Man from Primrose Lane sat on the hardwood floor and crossed his legs.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I get you some water?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He nodded and looked at me the way a hawk looks upon its prey from a distance. “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “To find the man who killed Katy Keenan in 1999,” I said. “Why are you here?”

  “To find the man who killed Elaine and Elizabeth O’Donnell in 1989.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Not well. One of them was still abducted and the man got away.”

  “You saved the other one?”

  He shrugged and then said something quite odd: “We’ll see.”

  “Are you frightened of me for some reason?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “The where wasn’t hard,” he said. “I came back via Loveland, too. So did all the others, I think.”

  “So, there are other us’s? I mean, others … others of us?”

  He nodded, running his tongue along the inside of his mouth.

  “How many?”

  “Lots. See ’em every once in a while.”

  “But, then, how did you know when to come and get me?”

  “Got a guy in Loveland, listens for me. I pay him five hundred dollars a month to just listen.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Something about the machine shifting from backwards to forwards again causes a weird noise. Not quite a sonic boom. Deeper. Heavier. Been thinking about that a lot. I think, if you recorded an explosion and played it backwards at the slowest speed, with the bass turned up real loud, it might sound like that. Anyway, this guy calls me whenever he hears it and I send down one of my Sherlock ruffians.”