If I were smarter, I would have just served out the last three months of my job contract and I wouldn’t be hiding inside a crook in a corridor that is a three-dimensional representation of four actual dimensions, holding my breath as the warden floated through the air just several feet away.
The child next to me, barely eight years old, is also holding his breath.
I hope he doesn’t make a sound. Doesn’t stir. Doesn’t fight the screaming desire to let out that breath that comes as the carbon dioxide inside starts to build and triggers the most ancient of our reflexes, the one buried deep down in the lizard brain.
The crook, or nook, or eddy in space time that we’re crouched in, is a black shard of even blacker disquiet that the eye slips across. It’s an unsettling thing from the outside, like a piece of glass that slides across the eyeball without causing pain.
Being inside of it is even more upsetting.
My back presses against something that isn’t really a wall, that both gives and doesn’t. My back of my shirt is both a million miles away and a billion years behind me. Sweat takes an epoch to slide down the small of my back, which is a world away.
And then the floating orb of the warden has passed us, humming its way deeper into the labyrinth of ultra-black, monolithic walls around us. Above us, the heavy skies of when the Earth was still being formed, thick with fire from cometary impacts. Below, the floor is a mirrored plane of dimensional space that can’t be accessed, so forms to us mere mortals a solid surface.
Pretty messed up?
Yeah, my first several weeks here I was on Xanax and would curl up into a ball in my room with the drapes drawn shut and just cry.
But when you’re broke, you’ll take just about any short-term contract that pays well, offers room and board, and has a five thousand dollar sign up bonus that pays the moment you sign the contract and gives you a week to spend it.
I had thought I was getting away with something.
“Can we run, now?” the child asks.
“Yes. We can run.”
I hold his hand and we run down the corridor. Each step is ten thousand years towards the future. Luckily, we’ve been running for three hours already. Ducking into hiding places, turning off into rooms. The child’s eyes still taking in the skies above and the infinite black walls. I’d told him what to expect, told him what lay outside the commons.
Now he was scared.
So was I.
***
The ad had been buried in the middle of several other similar listings. A temp agency located in the middle of a failing strip mall outside the rust-belt town of Lincoln.
SIGNING BONU`$$$`. FEEL GOOD BY HELPING OTHERS.
I had half a tank of gas, an ashtray full of quarters, a duffel bag full of clothes, and a fuzzy, stuffed cat to my name. Guff, the cat, had been with me since the beginning. Since back when I’d had family and long before… before things got worse when I was a kid.
I’d been considering taking my friend George up on that job helping build the new nuclear plant.
I figured I’d try one last time to see if I could make Lincoln a go. I had experience doing menial work in an assisted care facility, which fit with the job description. And George was never good for me. Always had some scheme or another up his sleeve, even if a buck was a buck.
So, I’d pushed through the double glass doors, scuffed my boots on the faded industrial carpet, and stared at the scratched Formica-topped counter wondering if I’d come to the wrong place until a middle aged, pencil-thin woman in a gray suit came out and handed me a clipboard.
“Take the test, sign the application.”
There were a lot of questions. None of them, it seemed, related to medical work. Names of family. Names of friends. Was that a kind of background check? Coworkers. Pet names. I had briefly wondered if it had all been a way to get my personal info to hack any of my online accounts.
But I didn’t have any money, and I figured I had nothing to lose.
WHAT IS THE MOST EXCITING THING YOU’VE DONE IN YOUR LIFE?
What strange questions.
“They said there was a bonus?” I had asked loudly. “Who are they again?”
The woman looked at me. “It’s a five thousand dollar signing bonus. We’re the placement agency.”
Oh. Just contractors.
I had looked at the strange questions, and then set about answering them.
Five hours later, I had a five thousand dollar check and instructions to go to an empty warehouse in Lincoln. When I stepped through the doors, I fell into a time vortex that closed behind me as I screamed in incomprehension.
***
More running.
“How do you know we can get out?” the child asks. His brown eyes search me, looking for any hint of guile.
“Food,” I tell him. “It’s about food.”
The skies above us are no longer burning. They’re a swirl of brilliant stars.
“I don’t understand,” the child says.
“Every week the fridge gets stocked, and there’s bread in the cupboards.”
“And milk!” he adds.
“Milk. You’re right.”
“New DVDs.”
“Where,” I ask, stopping him from listing all the things that come in, “do you think all that comes from?”
He frowns. “I always thought it was magic, really.”
I shake my head. “No. It isn’t magic. They’re things. Made by people.”
He sort of remembers people. Grown-ups that aren’t the Caretakers like me. But for children younger than eight, few of those early memories persist. I remember straining to remember my parents. I’d lie on strange beds in homes that weren’t homes, closing my eyes and willing my parents’ faces back from the murkiness. But I only ever had impressions, or a faint snatch of a smell.
I could remember that I once knew them, but I couldn’t remember them.
“Maybe we shouldn’t keep running,” the child suggests. “We’re very far away from the commons, now. We don’t have any food.”
“We’re almost there,” I reassure him. “Would you like a water?”
I hand him a bottle from my small pack, and he takes it after a moment’s consideration and chugs it loudly. When he’s done, he looks down at it thoughtfully. “Will they have bottles of water where we are going?”
***
The child is innately curious. That’s what impressed me at first. It took my mind off the madness of my situation. Asked about the scar on my upper arm. The one I try never to look at.
There were fifteen children in the commons, which hung in the middle of a bubble of milky nothingness, spiky vines of solid black reaching from it off into the cells of other potential fractals of space and time. I fear I’m not describing it well, but the entire structure, sealed off away from space and time, was hardly comprehendible by tiny minds like my own.
What I *can* describe is that the great platter of the Commons was a garden five miles across, with gently sloping hills in the center. A modern apartment complex, clearly ripped off from Frank Lloyd Wright (or, knowing what I know now, maybe even designed by him!), hung over a babbling river.
There are basketball courts. Two treehouses built in the carefully maintained forest behind the hills. It reminded me when I first saw it of a college campus I’d visited once. A mini city, but with many clear areas for physical pursuits of the not-yet-adult.
I liked the beach by the pond. As long as I didn’t look up. I *preferred* the forest, because there, wandering among the paths, with the trees blanketing above, I could pretend I was actually in a normal forest.
I use the word campus, because then I can only describe myself as a resident advisor of sorts. I never went to college myself, but I saw movies. When I arrived, I was shown to a large apartment in the center of the first floor of the apartment complex.
The old man who took me to the Commons called himself the Keeper of Souls. He’d been waiting for me when I hit the bottom of the timeless vortex. He had been wearing an old overcoat, a raggedy fisherman’s hat, and he’d held out an old oil lamp to cast a beam of light in the infinite darkness.
“You’re the new contractor,” he’d said in a papery-thin voice. “Come with me, the Commons is just a short walk.”
I’d said nothing, my mind quaking at the assault of passing through time and space, and then recoiling at the sight of the green disc of the Commons held by the tendrils of super-compressed dimensions in the void. The old man had held out an RFID-chipped keycard and said in a whispery voice, “If there’s anything you need, anything at all, just ask. There’s a phone by your microwave. My extension is zero. Only use it if you… absolutely must. The children are in the theater-room; they’ll be expecting you.”
And that was how I became Wendy to my tribe of little Peter Pans.
Though my name is Riley.
***
“What does food have to do with getting out?” the child asks, handing back the water bottle.
A water bottle might as well be magic to the child. They arrive in the refrigerators in the kitchen on the first floor when we’re asleep. Hell, it’s magic to me. I’m responsible for making dinner for the fifteen, but most of the deep freeze meals are easy to defrost, and the palettes of the under-ten are fairly straight forward. It is no problem for me to bake chicken fingers and microwave fries.
For breakfast, they have varieties of cereals and milk. I host pancake Fridays, even though days of the week don’t, as such, exist. I’m trusting my iPhone to keep time, even if it hasn’t had a signal in months.
Lunch is whatever they want to scrounge from the fridges. Usually, peanut butter and jelly. They almost never tire of it.
I have basic first aid training. I can dial zero for anything more than that.
I counsel them after fights.
But mostly they run in the forests, play in the lake, and eat voraciously when they return to the apartments. They play video games or watch movies in the theatre until they are too tired to stay up. Though I note the movies never have violence, or have anything to do with history.
I carry stragglers up to their rooms if they fall asleep.
I wonder where plumbers come from if something goes wrong with my toilet.
“How does food help us leave?” the child asks again, frustration creeping into his voice. I realize I’m losing myself in thought. It is easy to do here, where time is folding in on itself and so vast. As soon as the second week in the commons, staring at the sky, I realize I was becoming prone to long stretches of silence and contemplation.
“The food,” I say. “If I’m contracted to take care of you, then someone must be contracted to deliver the food.”
The child smiles. “You followed the man in the little van.”
I startle. “You know about the van?”
He nods. “It comes when the quiet creeps over the commons and everything stops.” The clocks, the motion of the river, the swaying of the trees from the alien wind. It happens when I’m not looking for it, out of the corner of my eye, just before I fall asleep, but before I can stop myself.
I took a caffeine pill right before sleep. An accident. Or maybe something in the back of my mind *knew*.
“I followed it,” I tell the child. “I found a way out.”
The van had been an old, museum-looking thing. The man in it wore a blue uniform, complete with a cap. He drove and drove down these corridors, and I struggled to keep up. But hours later, sweating and exhausted, I was rewarded by seeing it pass through the last of the horrible corridors and vanish into a vortex just like the one I’d come through to get here.
***
“What will we do on the other side?” the child asked.
“I don’t know.” I cannot leave him to the foster system. I tasted that myself. I have barely planned that far ahead. I have only known that I have seen something wrong, and have tried to fix it.
At first, I’d only done what I’d been told. Kept an eye on the children.
They ignored me. I was not the first Caretaker. I was just the latest. They obviously had lives and plans of their own. A treehouse extension. A large tunnel they were digging. Levels in video games to be beaten.
But then one of them wandered up to me. Stared right down through me and into my soul and asked, “What is it like, outside?”
And that had shaken me. Because until then, I’d assumed none of them knew there was anything other than the Commons.
Day by day, he’d kept asking small questions. Did I have family? Did I remember the sky? Instead of falling into my routine of day by day, ignoring the reality I was in, he would remind me there was something else. That I was just here temporarily.
That he was a prisoner.
That I was working with his captors.
Did I think of myself as a kidnapper of children?
No.
But somehow, after two weeks, without this child ever suggesting as much, I started to believe I was.
***
After all these hours of walking, after all this time and space kicking up under our heels, with the skies shifting overhead, light pollution slowly fading the stars out, we arrive. I’ve been keyed up, waiting for the warden to reappear.
The child had called it that, I remember. Said they floated around the Commons, watching the children. Stopping them from leaving the island suspended in nothingness.
“Riley!”
I freeze.
It is the Keeper of Souls. This is the first time I have seen him since he took me to the Commons.
He does not look threatening, but his voice is firm. I notice that he has ink-black eyes, and I had thought he had a beard under those wrinkled cheeks, but it has never been there, I realize. He is clean-shaven.
“You cannot stop me,” I tell him. I place myself between him, the warden, and the child. The vortex, which makes our eyes water with incomprehension, swirls just a few yards away. We can almost jump into it.
“I know,” says the Keeper of Souls. He crooks his fingers, waves, and the orb fades away. It suddenly… never was. Much like the beard I had thought he had. “I am not here to harm anyone. You are safe.”
He gestures again, and I stagger back to jump. But my feet land on the balcony of my apartment. I am looking out over the river, the forest, the large pond. Children are screaming and splashing on the artificial beach. Two girls are playing badminton on a freshly mowed lawn.
The translocation twists something in my stomach. I throw up into a potted hibiscus.
The Keeper of Souls opens the sliding door and limps into my apartment. He busies himself making tea as I try to regain my bearings.
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” he says, setting a hot cup down on the coffee table where I find myself sitting. I’m unsure if he has warped time and space around me again, or if my mind is stuttering. “It’s an unpleasant sensation, even for the most prepared and familiar.”
“The…the child?”
“Yes, the child.” The Keeper of Souls strokes the several foot long beard that hangs over his chest. He props dirty feet up on my coffee table. “He is back in his room. Riley, we talked about this.”
“We did?” I’m horribly confused.
But so is the old man. He looks pained. “I’m so sorry. It’s swirls of time, maybe things got dislocated. But, this should have been a part of your briefing. Do you not remember?”
There’s a hazy recollection.
“It’s the nature of this place,” the Keeper of Souls says, not unkindly. “Memory can be complicated as well. Particularly for contractors. It’s your first time. And only a short stint.”
“It’s not fair, what you’re doing to them,” I blurt. “You’ve ripped them from their families, their places.”
I realize I’m crying.
The Keeper of Souls moves next to me, wipes a tear from my cheek with the cuff of his robe. He sighs. Pulls back his hood. He hasn’t shaved in a few days; a dark stubble makes him look a bit tired. “I think I understand. We missed something very important. Do you remember your parents, Riley?”
I swallow. “No.”
“Do you remember when your mom took that knife?”
“No.”
The Keeper of Souls shakes his head. “But you do. You remember. No matter what they wrote down, you remember. She didn’t try to kill you, she tried to protect you.”
Time fractures again, but this time it is definitely my mind. A place I have tried to avoid for a lifetime. A woman screaming. A man’s anger. And so much blood.
Murder suicide, they called it.
“Do you remember what your father did?”
I do. I don’t want to, but I do.
“Imagine the people worse than him. The ones who killed more than just a mother. Imagine the mass killers. If you could go back in time, Riley, to that moment, right now, would you try to stop him?”
I look up at the Keeper of Souls. I nod, tears dripping from my chin. “I’d kill him,” I hissed.
His ancient eyes harden. “What if you could go back in time to when he was a child? Would you? Would you stop all that pain, save your mother? Could you do that?”
I stare.
Could I?
I look at the children playing throughout the commons. “Is that…?”
The Keeper of Soul’s eyes soften. “Your father is not here. But if he were, would you do it?”
I let out a deep breath. “I… I don’t know.”
“They used to call it the Hitler dilemma.”
“Who?” I ask, puzzled.
The Keeper of Souls smiles. “If you can go back in time and stop a great mass murderer by killing his child self, would you? Far at the end of time, amazed at having survived, we asked that question. We bent time and space, and came back. But, who among us are killers? Would we be no better than the ones we are sent to judge?”
For a moment, the Keeper of Souls sips his tea thoughtfully.
“I will not do it,” I say.
“No one asks you to.” He smiles sadly. “Who would murder a child just for its potential when one could just give it to another family for adoption. Maybe even in another time. You’d be amazed what a good pre-school and decent social safety net does to a dictator, or a good psychologist can do for a serial killer. Most of our worst killers are scattered among time and space for rehabilitation. But a few, a select few, the greatest abominations… even where I come from, we cannot risk letting them out into the general population.”
The sound of children’s laughter rises to my balcony. The splash of a cannonball.
“He figured out your vulnerability. Got you to navigate the corridors of space and time. Tricked you, so he could hide in the glitches where our eyes can’t make sense of what they see, all to get you to try to take him back to where he came from.” The Keeper of Souls smiled sadly. “There’s a reason our contractors are drawn from different times and places, for short periods of time.”
I stand up slowly and walk toward the balcony. I look up at the void above.
“Take heart,” the Keeper of Souls says. “It’s only another month, and then you’ll be back in your time. You’ll have enough money to avoid having to work that construction job and avoid cutting some corners with George. Trust me, it’ll save a lot of lives.”
And then, he’s gone.
I’m alone, on a couch, watching the children slowly melting out of the woods toward the apartment complex.
It is dinner time.
And I shiver.
Only a month.
How much longer will that be in a place where time and space swirl above me in the sky?