Ancient Fire Read online

  “That’s it,” he said under his breath. “Wait here.”

  He left the room, but I went after him. Who wants to be left alone in a strange place dressed up to look like a nearly two-hundred-year-old war?

  When I stepped into the office, Dad was hitting the bell over and over. The typing had stopped again, and the man with the big eyes came out from the back.

  “I hear you,” he said.

  “That television,” my dad said, sounding both excited and mad, “seemed to be receiving broadcast signals through the air. And there was news about the Vietnam War. That was before I was born.”

  And it was sure before I was born. Just like the Civil War. But I’ve read about both of them in history books.

  “There were TV networks on that don’t even exist anymore,” Dad continued, “and it was missing some that have been around for years. What’s going on?”

  I still couldn’t tell what had him so upset. It just looked like some kind of super-retro show, though even twentieth-century retro is pretty old-fashioned by now. Maybe it was just some new kind of wireless device.

  “You say that seems strange to you?”

  “Look…” My dad walked over and picked up a device with a numbered circle in the middle and a couple of speakers in the handset. He listened. “An old telephone. With a live signal.”

  That was a telephone? It was way too big! “Television and phones haven’t looked like this, or worked this way, in years. What is this?”

  “How should a phone look?”

  My dad took out his cell card and flipped it on. “Like this.” The screen remained blank. “Nothing.” Dad looked right into the motel guy’s magnified eyes, and the motel guy looked right back. “What’s going on?”

  “My name is Andrew Jackson Williams,” he said, offering his hand, “and I’m pestered by visions. Would you and your boy care to join me for dinner?”

  A.J., as he liked to be called, grilled up a couple hamburgers for himself and Dad, and I was a little surprised, since real cow beef usually cost so much. But Dad enjoyed it. I’d never gotten used to the taste, so instead I had a cheese sandwich.

  A.J. told us he used to be the preacher at the First Church in Vinita. “But I couldn’t keep doing it,” he said. “I had visions, and when I talked about them up in the pulpit, people got a little” — he looked around, as if someone else might be listening — “edgy.”

  “What kind of visions?” Dad asked, happily eating what was probably his first burger in years.

  A.J. put his food down, then took a pen out of his pocket. He made a drawing on a napkin — a cloth napkin — and held it up. It was a circle.

  “Time,” he said, “doesn’t really move in a straight line at all. It moves in and around everything, and them that know, know that everything really happens all at once. Or that everything that went before is still happening somewhere else. I’m putting it all down in the book I’m writing. I’m telling people that nothing ever goes away.”

  “What doesn’t?” I asked. Sometimes I just don’t know what grownups mean about anything.

  “Personally,” Dad said, putting the unfinished half of his burger down, “I’d like to give time a little rest. Maybe avoid it altogether, if I can.”

  “How are you going to do that?” A.J. asked.

  “By going to California.”

  “Might work.” He nodded, chewing thoughtfully. “It’s worked for some.” Now it was his turn to put down the burger. Then he pointed at me. “But it won’t work for the boy. He’s touched.”

  “Touched by what?”

  “The hidden truth about time.”

  Now it wasn’t just getting weird — it was getting scary. The conversation kind of died down after that, and after Dad took a couple more bites of his food, we went back to our room. The TV was still on. It showed a man running on a beach, being chased by a giant balloon.

  As we stood there, there was a knock on the door. It was A.J.

  “I don’t mean to be inhospitable,” he said, “but there’s a break in the storm. This might be a good chance to move along to where you need to be.”

  My dad looked back at him. “I guess it might.”

  A.J. helped us get our stuff back in the car. “Hate to lose customers,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s for the best.” The full moon was reflecting off his glasses, but you could see how fierce and alive those eyes were.

  “Let me pay you…” Dad took out his wallet and held out a credit card.

  “You probably know that your credit and your money won’t work here.”

  “I probably do,” my dad agreed. Then he did something that really surprised me; he took out a picture of my mom.

  “I don’t suppose…” And he let the question hang there for a while before finishing. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen this woman anytime recently, have you?”

  A.J. took the photo of Mom and squinted at it under the moon.

  “I haven’t seen anyone like that lately,” he said at last.

  “Lately?” Dad asked.

  “It’s been a long life,” A.J. replied. Dad kept looking at him. “But I’ll keep both eyes open for her.”

  Dad handed A.J. a slip of paper. “This is where we’ll be in California,” he said.

  A.J. put it in his pocket without looking at it. “That’s where you’ll be,” he said. “But when will you be there?”

  “Just as soon as we can.” And a minute later, Dad was steering the truck through the Oklahoma night, while I tried to stay awake in the seat next to him.

  There was a lot I didn’t understand about what had happened, but there was one question I had to ask first. “Why did you show him Mom’s picture?”

  “Because, honey…” Honey? He hadn’t called me honey in years. Since I was a kid. Now he was waving his hand at the windshield, indicating the night, the stars, and the moon. “I think your mother is still alive. Somewhere out there. Someplace.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think the lab accident put her somewhere else in time, Eli. Some when else.”

  My stomach felt a little knotted up, like when you get bad news. But maybe this was good news. How come he never came out and told me any of this before?

  “How?”

  “There’s a lot to explain. Can we talk about it in the morning, son?” He never called me son either. What was with him? “It’s a long night, and I have a lot of driving to do. And you still have to get some sleep.”

  “That’s not fair.” I decided to stay up and keep asking questions, but somewhere in Kansas, I let my guard down and drifted off.

  When I woke up, the sun was shining — it was almost scorching hot — and we were a thousand miles down the road, ready to eat a late breakfast in Arriba, Colorado.

  Chapter Four

  Eli: North of Joe DiMaggio

  June 19, 2019 C.E.

  Thirty hours after Colorado — I had pancakes there, even though it was near lunchtime — and more of my dad’s high-speed driving (hydro-cell motors aren’t usually loud, but he could really make ours scream), we arrived at the Valley of the Moon.

  Like with most of our arrivals, we got there at night.

  The only unusual thing that happened in that last part of the drive was that I finally got a message from Andy. We were driving through Nevada, and I was surfing around on my vidpad when I saw I had some new mail. I’d been expecting a package — a bunch of new Barnstormer character animations that Andy had made himself or gotten on his roamer, or maybe a clip of him talking to the screen. Instead, I was surprised to see that it was just a typed sentence:

  How you doing?

  It wasn’t even his voice. Just the printed words.

  “This whole trip has felt like the end of a game,” I said, watching the words pop up on the vidpad as I composed a reply. “Like the way Barnstormers always have to flee town.” It was on account of a low tolerance for monsters in most of the places they played. I was feeling a little bit
on the run myself.

  “But overall, not bad,” I added to the message.

  Looking at those short sentences made me feel farther from Andy, and from home, than the actual miles did.

  And anyway, the big game I was getting sucked into was really just starting. Beginning with our arrival at Moonglow.

  But what do you call a game that gets way too serious?

  On the way out, since we were going to live near San Francisco, I read up on local baseball history. Turns out Joe DiMaggio came from there and played for an old minor-league team called the Seals, and of course Willie Mays played for the Giants in the old days, sixty or more years ago. Baseball historians say being a Giants fan is almost as hard as being a fan of the Cubs or the Indians. But at least they won the series when I was little.

  Maybe that’s a bad omen, deliberately moving fifty miles north of such a run of hard luck. Apparently the person in our family who started Moonglow wrestled a lot with his luck, too.

  It was some great-uncle of mine, Solomon, I think — in any case, a brother of my granddad, Silas Sands (and boy, am I glad my dad broke the “S” chain and didn’t give me a name like Sam or Sylvester) — who tried to start the winery, with some money he made way back by investing in a company that made clunky old desktop computers that you couldn’t even fold up.

  I never met Solomon or my granddad, but when Dad was a kid, he spent part of a summer working at the winery before it went bust.

  That’s where the lucky streak started to wind down; a couple of plant diseases wiped out a lot of the grapes, and when the fruit recovered, my great-uncle found out nobody wanted to buy a wine called Moonglow, at least not one with a creepy picture of a glowing glass of green wine on the label.

  That was my great-uncle again: He thought he was an artist, and insisted on designing the label himself.

  So the winery sat there, and Solomon had some kids who grew up and eventually planned to use the land for a shopping center or something, but never got around to it. Both of them died, without kids of their own, so Moonglow wound up in my dad’s hands, and sat there until the time that he needed to escape. When that tax bill came, reminding him of the winery’s existence, I heard him laugh. It was the first time he laughed since Mom vanished.

  The winery itself was kind of falling apart; the roof had holes, and water was getting inside.

  Our first night there, we just took sleeping bags out of the car and found a dry spot on the wood floor in what used to be the tasting room.

  On the morning of the third day, Dad drove to Sonoma in search of some basic roofing supplies. His idea was that he and I would fix up Moonglow and wait things out.

  Which things?

  I don’t think he was sure. Life itself, maybe, so that no more bad stuff could happen to us.

  I don’t know why he thought that would work.

  By the seventh day, we’d patched up several holes in the roof and polished the floors. We cleaned up a small dinette table and some chairs we’d found in an old employees’ lunch- room and made that our kitchen.

  There’d never been many employees — my dad, that summer, was one of the few — but there was a lunchroom.

  The building sat next to a hill, and there were caves dug out of the side, which you entered from the winery. They were made of limestone and were used to store the wine at a cool temperature.

  By the ninth day, I was really beginning to think that this wasn’t just a phase my dad was going through, and maybe I could stay out of school for the whole rest of my life, since he hadn’t gotten around to even talking about where I might want to go.

  On the tenth day, a package arrived.

  Now, Dad hadn’t told anybody where we were going — well, nobody but A.J., but I’m not sure if that counted — but it wasn’t necessarily a huge secret. We weren’t trying to hide. I mean, I told Andy. And anyway, between stuffing a vidpad into your pocket and carrying a cell card, it’s not like anyone was hard to locate.

  But we weren’t going out of our way to let anyone know where we were headed, either. We just locked up the house and drove straight out of Jersey.

  And now here we were. Between our drive out and nailing tarpaper on the roof together, Dad and I were the closest we’d been since the accident. And then the package came.

  From Mr. Howe.

  There was no announcement, no preparation. An unmarked delivery truck just whizzed up our road, and a man stepped out, tapping a vidpad.

  “You Mr. Sandusky?”

  “I’m Sandusky Sands.”

  “Package. Sign here.”

  Dad looked at the pad, then up at him. “Why?”

  The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m supposed to deliver it anyway.” And with that, he opened the back and eased an enormous wooden crate onto his hover-dolly, then lowered it onto the ground.

  “You want this somewhere?”

  Dad shrugged back. He was beginning to slip back into his gray, blank sadness already.

  The delivery man glided the crate over to the tasting room, where we’d spent our first night. When it still felt like camping and the start of a new adventure.

  After the truck hummed away, I went up to look at the box. Dad hadn’t moved.

  I could see the label:

  DR. SANDUSKY SANDS

  MOONGLOW REMOTE LAB

  VALLEY OF THE MOON

  SONOMA CO., CALIFORNIA

  On the top, instead of a return address, were some familiar initials:

  DARPA

  Dad didn’t even open the crate. He just walked inside, sat down in a plastic chair in the old lunchroom, and started to cry.

  Not for long, but just enough to scare me. Not that I think guys shouldn’t ever cry, or anything. But this was my dad.

  Then suddenly he got up.

  He walked to our truck and took out a crowbar and began popping slats off the box. Sure enough, there was a sphere generator inside. They wanted Dad to keep making the time spheres. And because he knew how to make them, no matter where he went, there wouldn’t be any escape from Mr. Howe.

  Now, instead of crying, Dad was smiling. Grownups’ emotions are always so unpredictable.

  “They’ll never be able to make me use it,” Dad said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “No WOMPERs,” he replied.

  “What are ‘WOMPERs’?” They sounded like some creatures from a Barnstormer game. Like a Frankenstein monster who could swing a mean bat.

  “I’ll tell you while we make dinner.”

  “Making dinner” was opening a couple cans of spaghetti and uncorking some wine. Well, Dad had the wine, and I had some chocolate rice milk. Sandusky had found a few cases of unopened Moonglow wine a couple days back and, for the first time, decided to crack open a bottle.

  He was feeling pretty good again, all things considered, and told me about WOMPERs between bites of noodles and tomato sauce.

  “WOMPERs stands for ‘Wide Orbital Massless ParticlE Reversers,’” Dad said, writing it out on the side of a wine label so I could see where the capital letters fell to make up its nickname. “They’ve only been recently discovered, in the farthest parts of space. The oldest parts. We theorized about them, but couldn’t prove they really existed. We thought they were only around for a little while after the big bang, then disappeared.”

  “Why?”

  “It takes too much concentrated energy to make a WOMPER. And the universe has been spreading itself pretty thin lately.”

  “What’s a WOMPER do?”

  My dad must’ve been excited by me asking all these questions. I usually left the science to him and Mom.

  “If it passes through an electron or a proton, it reverses the charge. It can do this so rapidly that around any concentration — any buildup — of matter, it acts almost like an agitator in a washing machine.” He was holding up his hand and waving it back and forth. “It does even stranger things to a positron.”

  “You mean the positrons you use for
the time spheres?”

  Those were the backward-traveling particles Dad used as the “fuel” for his, well, his time machines. Though he hates it when they’re called that.

  “Right. Since a positron is already a reversed particle — a backward electron — when it’s hit by a WOMPER, the positron’s properties are speeded up, made more intense. It blasts backward through time faster, with more energy.”

  “They make your time spheres stronger?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So if you had some WOMPERs…”

  “That’s what Mr. Howe thought. Get some WOMPERs and rev these time spheres up. Make them work at warp speed.”

  “Would it?”

  “We don’t have to worry. WOMPERs don’t occur naturally on Earth, or anywhere near it. Mr. Howe was able to get some once, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing any more of them in our lifetime.”

  He grew quiet again, then had some more spaghetti and some more red wine. Afterward, we bundled up in our sleeping bags and got the last good night’s sleep we were going to have in a very long time.

  If not forever.

  Chapter Five

  Eli: WOMPERs and Wolf House

  June 30, 2019 C.E.

  The next day, more men arrived. Some of them belonged to a power crew, and got heavy-duty electrical lines up and running to Moonglow by midafternoon.

  I asked them where all the extra power was coming from.

  “It’s been arranged,” one of them said. They didn’t ask us to sign anything.

  Dad and I took a walk while they worked. He didn’t want to be near them. That was the first time we discovered Wolf House. Dad read the plaque about the writer, Jack London.

  My dad stood and looked at the ruins of the house. “Imagine everything you love going up in smoke like that.”

  When we got back from the walk, Mr. Howe was waiting for us.

  He just sat near the front door of Moonglow, smiling again, this time like some out-of- town cousin who gets to your house early and waits around for you to let him in.