Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  “I’m going—” The man paused and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he smiled at Bennett. “Home,” he said. “I’m going home.”

  Bennett nodded. “You want to come in for a while? Have a cup of coffee?” He had never heard of a ghost that came in for coffee but, what the hell . . . all of this was crazy so anything was possible. He glanced along the street and saw that the mist seemed to be thinning out, the first vague shapes and outlines of the houses opposite taking hesitant form.

  The man followed Bennett’s stare and when he turned back there was a wistful smile on his mouth. “Can’t stay too long,” he said.

  “No,” Bennett agreed. He nodded to the fog. “Bad day.”

  The man turned around but didn’t comment. Then he said, “You ever think it’s like some kind of vehicle? Like a massive ocean liner?”

  “What? The fog?”

  The man nodded, gave a little flick of his shoulders, and stared back into the mist. “Like some huge machine,” he said, “drifting along soundlessly and then—” he snapped his fingers “—suddenly pulling into a port or a station, somewhere we’ve not seen for a long time . . . sometimes for so long it’s like . . . like we’ve never seen it at all. And it reveals something that you weren’t expecting . . . weren’t expecting simply because you don’t know how far you’ve traveled.” He turned back. “How far not just in distance but in time.”

  “In time?” Bennett said, glancing out at the swirling mist. “Like a time machine,” he said.

  The man smiled, the intensity suddenly falling away. “Yeah, like a time machine. Or something like that.”

  Bennett stepped aside and ushered the man into the house.

  The man who looked for all the world like John Differing removed his hat and held it by the brim with both hands at his waist. Looking around the kitchen, he said, “Nice place.”

  Bennett closed the door and stood alongside the man, noting with an inexplicable sadness that he seemed to be around four or five inches shorter than he remembered. He followed the man’s stare and drank in the microwave oven, the polished electric hobs, the chest freezer over by the back door, the small TV set on the breakfast counter. What would these things look like to someone who had not been around since 1972?

  “We like it,” Bennett responded simply. “So, coffee?”

  The man shrugged as Bennett walked across the kitchen to the sink. “Whatever you’re making.”

  “Coffee’s fresh. Shelley—my wife—she made it. It might have gotten a little strong, sitting. I’ll just boil some water.”

  “Uh huh. She here?”

  “Shelley? No, she’s out. Shopping. Christmas shopping. With her sister. Does it every year.” Placing the kettle on its electric base, Bennett pulled a chair from the table. “You want to sit down?”

  The man shook his head. “No, I don’t think I can stay that long. Don’t want to get too settled.”

  “Right.”

  The man placed his hat on the table and straightened his shoulders. “Mind if I look around?”

  “No, no . . . go right ahead. Coffee’ll be ready in a couple of minutes.”

  He watched the old man walk off along the hallway and tried to think of all the things he wanted to ask him. Things like, what was it like . . . where he was now? Things like, did he know who he was . . . and that he was dead? Did he even know that Bennett was—

  “This your office?” The voice drifted along the hallway and broke Bennett’s train of thought.

  “Yes.” The kettle clicked off and Bennett poured water into the electric coffee jug.

  “You work from home?” The voice had moved back into the hallway.

  “Yeah. I gave up my day job about five years ago. I write full-time now.” He went to the refrigerator and got a carton of milk.

  Pouring steaming coffee into a couple of mugs, Bennett wondered what the hell he was doing. The fog and the fact that it had cut him off from civilization had messed up his head. A stupid handbill—he felt in his pocket to make sure it was still there . . . make sure he hadn’t imagined it—some half-baked ramblings about the fog maybe being a time machine that the dead used to travel back and forth, and the appearance of a man who looked a little like his father had freaked him out. Looked like his father! What the hell was that? He hadn’t even seen his father for twenty-seven years.

  He shook his head and added milk to the mugs. The fact was he had invited some guy into the house, for crissakes. Shelley would go ape-shit when she found out. If he told her, of course. Putting the milk back in the refrigerator, he suddenly thought that maybe Shelley would find out . . . when she got home and found her husband lying in the kitchen with a knife in his—

  “What kind of stuff do you write?” the man asked, standing right behind him in the kitchen.

  “Shit!” He spun around and banged into the refrigerator door.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You startled me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I’m sorry for—”

  “Didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Really, it’s okay.” He closed the refrigerator door and took a deep breath. “Guess I must be a little nervous.” He waved a hand at the window. “The fog.”

  The man walked across to the counter by the sink and nodded to the window. “Looks like it’s clearing up.” He reached a hand out towards the two mugs and said, “Either?”

  Nodding, Bennett said, “Yeah, neither of them have sugar, though. There’s a bowl over to your—”

  “I don’t take it.” He picked up one of the mugs and, closing his eyes, took a sip. “Mmm, now that’s good. You don’t know how good coffee tastes until you haven’t had it for a while.”

  The man continued to sip at his coffee, eyes downcast, as though studying the swirling brown liquid.

  Bennett considered just coming right out with it there and then, confronting this familiar man with the belief that he was Bennett’s very own father. But the more he watched him, the more Bennett wondered whether he was just imagining things . . . even worse, whether he was in some way trying to bring his father back. After all, who ever heard of a handbill that advertised returning dead relatives. He may just be putting two and two together and getting five.

  On the other hand, maybe it was his father. It could well be that there were forces or powers at large in the universe that made such things possible. Maybe Rod Serling had had it right after all. Maybe the dead did use mist as a means of getting around—so many movies had already figured that one out . . . and maybe they did travel in time.

  Bennett took a sip of his own coffee and thought of something he had often pondered over: if a chair falls over in an empty house miles from anywhere, does it make a sound? Natural laws dictate that it must do, but there were plenty of instances of natural law seemingly not figuring out. The thing was—the thing with the chair in the deserted house—there was no way of proving or disproving it . . . because the only way to prove it was to have someone present at the falling over, which destroyed one of the criteria for the experiment. So maybe whatever one wanted to believe could hold true.

  The same applied to the man in Bennett’s kitchen. So long as Bennett didn’t actually come right out and ask him and risk the wrong response.

  John Differing? No, name’s Bill Patterson, live over to Dawson Corner, got a flooded Packard couple blocks down the street, and a wife in it—Elite’s her name—busting to get home soon as this fog’s cleared up

  it was safe to assume the man was Bennett’s father. And the plain fact was there were so many things that supported such a belief. Thinks like . . .

  “My father drank his coffee that way, sipping,” Bennett said, pushing the encroaching silence back into the corners of the room where it didn’t pose a threat.

  The man looked up at Bennett and smiled. “Yeah?”

  Bennett nodded. “Looked a lot like you do, too.”

  “That right?”

  Bennett took a deep b
reath. “He died more than twenty-seven years ago. He was fifty-eight.” He took another sip and said, “How old are you? If you don’t mind my—”

  “Don’t mind at all. I’m fifty-eight myself.”

  “Huh,” Bennett said, shaking his head. “Quite a coincidence.”

  “Looks like it’s a day for them,” the man said as he lowered his cup down in front of his waist. “My boy—my son—he always wanted to be a writer.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I must say, I never had much faith in that. Seemed like a waste of time to me.” He lifted the cup again. “But a man can be wrong. Could be he made a go of it.” His mouth broke into a soft smile. “Could even be he’ll get real successful a little ways down the track.”

  Bennett wanted to ask if the man ever saw his son these days, but that would have been breaking the rules of the game . . . just as it would have been courting disaster. The response could be Sure, saw Jack just last week and he’s doing fine. And Bennett didn’t want that response. But the more they talked, the more sure he became.

  They talked of the man’s past and of the friends he used to have.

  They talked of places he had lived and things he had done.

  And in amongst all the talk, all the people and all the places and all the things, there were people and places and things that rang large bells in Bennett’s mind—so many coincidences—but there were also several people and places and things that didn’t mean anything at all. Things Bennett had never known about his father. But he still refrained from asking anything that might place the man in some kind of cosmic glitch . . . or that might provoke an answer that would break the spell.

  In turn, Bennett told the man things about his father . . . things that not only was he sure his father had never known but also that he himself hadn’t known. Not reallyknown . . . not known in that surface area of day-to-day consciousness that we can access whenever we want.

  And each time Bennett said something, the man nodded slowly, a soft smile playing on his lips, and he would say, “Is that right?” or “You don’t say” or, more than once, “You make him sound like quite a man.”

  “He was. Quite a man.”

  For a second, the man looked like he was about to say something, the edge of his tongue peeking between those gently smiling lips

  thank you

  but he seemed to think better of it and whatever it had been was consigned to silence.

  Bennett placed his mug on the counter and pulled the handbill from his pocket. “You believe in ghosts?” he asked.

  “Ghosts?”

  “Mm hmm.” He moved across to the man and showed him the handbill. “Got this today, in the newspaper. Ever hear of anything like that?”

  The man shook his head. “Can’t say that I have, no.”

  “You think such a thing is possible?”

  The man shrugged. “They do say anything’s possible. Maybe ghosts see everything in one hit . . . the then, the now and the to come. Maybe time doesn’t mean anything at all to them. Could be they just hop right on board of their fog time machine and go wherever or whenever they’ve a mind.”

  Bennett looked again at the handbill, his eyes tracing those curly letters. “But why would they want to come back . . . ghosts, I mean?”

  “Maybe because they forget what things were like? Forget the folks they left behind? They say the living forget the dead after a while: well, maybe it works both ways.” He shrugged again, looked down into his coffee. “Who knows.”

  Was the man nervous? Bennett frowned. Maybe he was breaking some kind of celestial rules by moving the conversation to a point where the man would have no choice but to corroborate Bennett’s belief . . . and maybe that would mean—

  He thrust the handbill back into his pocket and the man looked immediately relieved, if still a little apprehensive.

  “Yeah, well,” Bennett said in a dismissive tone, “what are ghosts but memories?”

  The man nodded. “Right. Memories. I like that. And what is Heaven but a small town . . . a small town like this one. A small town that’s just a little ways up or down the track.”

  Now it was Bennett’s turn to nod. “You know,” Bennett went on, “we used to play a game, back when I was a kid, where we used to say which sense we would keep if we were forced to give up all but one of the senses, and why.

  “Kids would say, ‘hearing’ and they’d say ‘because I couldn’t listen to my records,’ or they’d say ‘sight,’ ‘because I couldn’t read my comic books or watch TV or go to the movies.’ ”

  “And what did you say?”

  Bennett smiled. This was a story he’d told his father on more than one occasion. “I used to say I wouldn’t give up my memory, because without my memory nothing that had ever happened to me would mean anything. Everything I am—forget the skin and flesh and bone, forget the muscles and the sinews and the arteries—everything I am is memories.”

  The man smiled. “You ever stop to think that maybe you’re a ghost?”

  Bennett laughed. “Did you?”

  And the man joined in on the laughter. “An angel, maybe.”

  “An angel?”

  The man shrugged. “A messenger. That’s what angels are . . . messengers.”

  “Yeah? And what’s your message?”

  The man laughed. “Oh, that would be telling now. Wouldn’t it.”

  Bennett suddenly realized he could now see the house across the street quite clearly. Could see the front door opening . . . could see the unmistakable outline of Jenny Coppertone stepping out onto the front step, staring up into the sky. Then she turned around and went back into the house.

  Bennett heard the muted sound of a door slamming.

  The fog’s hold on the world was weakening.

  He looked across at the man standing in front of the sink, saw him frowning at the mug of coffee, shuffling his arms around like he was having difficulty with it. Maybe it was too hot for him . . . but, hadn’t he been drinking it all this time?

  Outside, a car went by slowly, its lights playing on the mist.

  Then the haurrrnk! blasted again, the same sound he’d heard before . . . but different in tone now. This time it sounded more like a warning.

  The man dropped the mug and Bennett watched it bounce once, coffee spraying across the floor and the table legs and the chairs.

  Bennett watched it roll to a stop—amazingly unbroken—before he looked up. The man was looking across at him, his face looking a little pale . . . and a little sad.

  “I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t keep a hold of it,” he said.

  “You have to go,” Bennett said. He knew it deep in his heart . . . deep in that place where he knew everything there was to know.

  “Yes, I have to go.”

  “I’ll see you off—”

  The man held up his hand. “No,” he snapped. And then, “No, I’m sure you’ve got things to do . . . things to be getting on with.”

  “Memories to build,” Bennett added.

  “Right, memories to build.” He moved forward from the counter, unsteadily at first, watching his feet move one in front of the other as though he were walking a tightrope. Bennett made to give him a hand but the man pulled away. “Can’t do that,” he said.

  They stood looking at each other for what seemed like a long time, Bennett desperately wanting to take that one step forward—that one step that would carry him twenty-seven years—and wrap his arms around his father, bury his face in his father’s neck and smell his old familiar smells, smells whose aroma he couldn’t recall . . . how desperately he wanted to give new life to old memories. But he knew he could not.

  As he reached the door, the man stopped for a second and turned around. “You know, my son, when he was a kid, he had a nickname.”

  Bennett smiled. “Yeah? What was it?”

  “Bubber.”

  “Bubber?” Oh my god . . . Bubber . . . it was Bubber because I—

  “He had a stutter—nothin
g too bad, but it was there—and his name was . . . his name began with a B.”

  Bennett could feel his eyes misting up.

  “Kids can be cruel, can’t they?”

  It was all he could do to nod.

  The door closed, the screen door slammed a ricochet rat-a-tat and Bennett was alone again . . . more alone than he had ever felt in his life. “Take care,” he said to the empty kitchen.

  And you, a voice said somewhere inside his head.

  He waited a full minute before he went to the door and opened it, stepped out into the fresh December air and walked to the street. “And what was the message, old timer?” he said.

  The fog had gone and the watery winter sun was struggling through the overhead early-morning haze.

  Cars were moving up and down, people were walking on the sidewalks, but there was no sign of the man.

  “Hey, Bennett!”

  Bennett gave a wave to Jack Coppertone as he pulled the handbill from his pants pocket. It was now a flyer for The Science Fiction Book Club; maybe that was what it had always been. As he folded it carefully, thinking back to that final sight of his visitor pulling open the door, he suddenly turned and ran back to the house.

  On the table, right where the man had placed it, was a hat.

  The message!

  Bennett walked carefully across the kitchen, heart beating so hard he thought it was going to burst through his chest and his shirt, and reached for it, closing his eyes, expecting to connect with just more empty air.

  But his fingers touched material.

  And he lifted it, not daring to open his eyes . . . he was breaking rules here, of that he was sure . . . but maybe, just maybe, if only one or maybe two senses were working, he could pull it off. He lifted the hat up and buried his face inside the brim.

  What are ghosts but memories? he heard himself saying from just a few minutes earlier. And there they were . . . memories. The only question was, were they from the past or the future?

  Almost as soon as he had breathed in, the fragrance dissipated until there was only the smell of soap and the feel of Bennett’s empty hands cradling his face. But deep inside his head, the memories were still there, smelling fresh as blue bonnets in spring air.