So You Had to Build a Time Machine Read online

  First off, Steely Dan never rocked anything. She read the first two paragraphs, just enough of the story to know Steely Dan apparently played from 8–10 p.m. at the Sprint Center, the exact time and place she’d worked. Skid glanced at the folio—September 3. It was the right paper. Second, I saw the Doobie Brothers. They told me Jesus was just all right.

  But there was that one guy.

  The crowd at the gate was quiet because it was the type of crowd that paid to see a fifty-year-old band. Skid stood beside a ticket taker in case of trouble, although the only trouble she noticed was that management had instructed security to wear their crimson T-shirts while she wore pink nail polish. Skid hated her colors to clash.

  “But,” the guy told the ticket taker. He was about 65 and red in the face. It could have been because of anger, or because it was hot enough for all the concert goers to sweat Geritol. “I bought a ticket to see Steely Dan.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but the Doobie Brothers are playing tonight.”

  Doobie Brothers/Steely Dan. Tim Binnall Boulevard/Tim Binnall Avenue. Pink-frosted muffins/chocolate-frosted muffins. What the hell is going on here?

  “May I see the ticket, sir?” Skid said, stepping forward and holding out her hand. He gave it to her without protest.

  Steely Dan

  brought to you by

  Boulevard Brewing Company

  Crossroads District

  Kansas City, Missouri

  7 p.m., September 2

  No refund.

  Something was wrong, and not just with the ticket. Skid felt it. She’d felt it the moment her fist connected with Bud Light Dave’s nose and that feeling hadn’t gone away. Things were off, like she’d taken an afternoon nap and woken up groggy. Big Chuck, the afternoon DJ on KYYS, said this on her drive to work, “The days are strange,” his voice rasped from the speakers in Skid’s car. “I’m not sure why, but something’s not right. Has anyone else noticed an odd feeling?”

  She handed the ticket back.

  “If you don’t mind seeing the Doobie Brothers, I think we’ll let you in, sir,” she said, then turned to the confused ticket taker. “The ticket’s legit and it’s for today. It just says the wrong band. Must be a misprint.”

  The ticket taker waved her electronic wand over the bar code on the ticket and handed it back to Steely Dan Guy, who looked even more confused than she did.

  Yeah, what the hell?

  Skid let the newspaper drop to the table and picked up her coffee from Dan’s Daylight Donuts. She hated it when people spelled doughnuts like that. It was just lazy.

  “I’m losing my mind,” she said over the lid before taking a drink. The coffee was just bad enough to pull her mind back to someplace she knew. She had to admit Hipster Dan Haggarty’s coffee was better.

  I worked the Doobie Brothers concert. I know I did. She sat the cup down when she realized her hands were shaking. For the first time since Skid had left home (if a trailer in a traveling circus can be called home), she didn’t feel in control.

  “I’m losing it,” she whispered. “There’s no other explana—”

  She stopped. Her eyes looked in disbelief at the picture in the newspaper of Donald Fagen singing something, probably “Rikki Don't Lose That Number,” or some other song that gave Skid a headache. Then her gaze dropped to the bottom of the page as she reached for her coffee again, this time with both hands. A headline froze her attention, “G-G-G-Ghost! Spectral spirit spotted at Sanderson Murder House.”

  The picture with the story, tagged “Star Photo by Carly,” was of someone she recognized.

  That guy?

  She’d jogged past the Sanderson Murder House Saturday morning just as two newsies stepped out of their car, but that seemed like a long time ago. The doofus in the picture (Cordrey Bellamy, the cutline read) had rushed out to meet them but gave her a look and a smile all the same. Skid drank more bad coffee and read the article. When she finished, she leaned back as far as she could in the wooden kitchen chair and stared at the ceiling. She had to go see the Muffin Man.

  4

  The sky opened and a body dropped from a swirling, purple hole. If anyone had been around (which they weren’t), they may have heard screaming, but since the screaming began at roughly 13,200 feet above sea level outside Kansas City and it traveled at about 150 miles per hour, it’s not surprising David’s screams did nothing but empty his lungs.

  He tried to think about why he was falling to his death and how he could mathematically predict his impact velocity if he could just ignore all the damn wind in his ears. The pain in his leg was distracting, but his mind was mostly consumed with Skid.

  A purple wave burst from the ground, shooting toward him like a missile. But the wave didn’t actually hit David, it enveloped him, caressed him, slowed him.

  A second later he reappeared five feet above a metal stock tank.

  5

  As the young mom opened the door out of Manic Muffins, the bell on a wire overhead jingled. “Bye, Brick,” her seven-year-old son Tanner said, waving the hand holding a muffin almost as big as his face, his other hand pinched in his mother’s. Tanner and his mom, Serenity, were regulars. They first came in on a slow day while Brick put the finishing touches on a Goliath Barbarian character, and Tanner caught sight of the fire giant on the cover of the Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook.

  “Cool. What is this stuff?” the boy asked, plucking a d20 from the counter.

  Brick told him, his eyes lighting up as he described the fun of gutting an orc. Tanner just grinned. About a week later, Serenity came in wearing a frown he thought better of telling her would give her crow’s feet if she kept it up.

  “I bought him that monster book thing—” she’d said.

  “The Monster Manual.”

  “Sure, fine, whatever. Anyway, that awful creature on the front—”

  “A beholder.”

  “I don’t care what you call it, it was horrible. He had to sleep in my bed for a week.”

  Brick gave her a free muffin for Tanner, but Serenity didn’t talk to him when they came in anymore. As for Tanner, well, Brick thought he might be Tanner’s new hero, but being someone’s hero didn’t stop Tanner from smearing whatever covers little boy’s hands all over Brick’s display case.

  As soon as the door shut behind them, Brick stepped out from behind the cash register with a rag and spray bottle. He knelt and squirted some of the blue stuff on the mysterious child streaks. He often wondered if children secreted slime. It would explain a lot.

  The bell over the door chimed and light footsteps padded across the polished hardwood floor of the old building.

  “Be with you in a second,” Brick said, scrubbing the glass with the rag.

  The soft, sure footsteps came closer. “Come on up, Hipster Dan Haggarty,” the voice said. “We have a problem.”

  He knew that voice. Brick pulled himself up to his full height and turned around. It was the girl from the bar, the one who threw the knife, the one who punched the Oilyman who wasn’t the Oilyman, the one who sweated herself into his business Saturday morning and bought a pink-frosted muffin that probably hadn’t stayed pink for long, since the rest of them hadn’t. She held a newspaper and coffee from a competitor’s business. Great.

  “My name’s Brick,” he said. “Before you ask, I used to be a bricklayer.”

  She took what looked like the last drink of her coffee and set the cup on a table made from a cable spool, then spread the newspaper out next to it. The woman, dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt, wasn’t as sweaty today as she’d been Saturday. Her hair was once again tied in a ponytail.

  “Brick? Sure, okay,” she said, her tone all business. “I was witness to something weird at Slap Happy’s Dance Club Friday night.” She pointed toward Brick’s vast expanse of chest. “You were witness to something weird at Slap Happy’s Dance Club Friday night.”
>
  He nodded slightly. “I tried to talk with you about that Saturday.”

  The woman waved off the words. “I know. I just wasn’t ready to talk about it.” She paused, her face serious. “I am now. You might think Friday night was as messed up as they come, but it wasn’t. Things have gotten worse.” The woman dropped a finger on the front page of the Around The City section of The Kansas City Star. “Read this, then we’ll talk.”

  6

  G-G-G-Ghost!

  Spectral spirit spotted at Sanderson Murder House

  By Beverly Gibson

  KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The backdrop is that of a Hollywood blockbuster. Quiet family, quiet neighborhood, quiet city. Then a little corner of reality snaps and all of this is gone in one wicked night of bloodshed.

  Kansas City witnessed such a night on Sept. 19, 1984, when, at 8:50 p.m., Delbert Sanderson crept through his home at 427 Gerry Avenue holding a samurai sword dripping with the blood of his own family. Today, the house belongs to Cordrey Bellamy, 35, a Kansas City, Missouri, native who’s not old enough to remember the slayings, but values their place in the infamous part of the city’s past.

  “The Sanderson murders are legendary, but that legend had started to fade with time,” he said. “I bought the house because I didn’t want a piece of Kansas City history forgotten.”

  The slaying of almost an entire family—mother, son and their dog—brings people to the Sanderson house out of an intense curiosity in the macabre and the possibility of experiencing something otherworldly. Bellamy hosts ghost tours at the house most nights of the week and Friday, 20 guests got exactly what they paid for—the ghost of Thomas Sanderson.

  Thomas “Tommy” Sanderson was 32 years old the night in September when Delbert Sanderson chased him down on the ground floor hallway and ended his life. It was in that hallway Bellamy’s guests got a glimpse of the past.

  Bellamy held an electromagnetic frequency meter (EMF), a device paranormal enthusiasts claim can detect the presence of ghosts. When the group moved into the hallway, the meter went off.

  Tamara Hooper, 25, of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, was there when it happened.

  “We were all here. Right here,” she said, standing in the hallway Saturday morning. “And Cord’s meter went all crazy.”

  Seconds later, witnesses claim a full-bodied apparition appeared floating two feet in the air before it crashed onto the hardwood floor still stained with Tommy Sanderson’s blood.

  Olan Wanker, who lived next door to the Sandersons the night of the murder, stood in the hallway with the other spectators Friday.

  “It was the ghost of Tommy Sanderson,” he said.

  All 20 guests described the same entity.

  “A man in his thirties with brown hair, white shirt, gray pants and a really surprised look on his face,” Bellamy said.

  The experience, however, wasn’t over just yet. Tommy Sanderson spoke to Bellamy.

  “‘Where’s Skid?’” Bellamy said. “The ghost of Tommy Sanderson said, ‘Where’s Skid?’ We have no idea what or who Skid is.”

  Connie Franklin, R.N., of Overland Park, Kansas, who came to the ghost tour right after work at Saint Luke’s Hospital, said the event was eerie.

  “It was the most exciting—and creepy—thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “I’m definitely coming back.”

  Tommy Sanderson may have even made himself known during the interview. Lights flashed and dials jumped on the EMF meter when Bellamy demonstrated it in the downstairs hallway.

  Susan (Sanderson) Meek, the only surviving member of the Sanderson family, was away at college at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville the night of Sept. 19, 1984. Meek doesn’t believe the story of the haunting.

  “It upset me when that man turned our house into a tourist attraction,” Meek said. “Dad was sick. This sort of thing just glorifies him.”

  She also doubts the claims of the people who saw her brother.

  “Tommy?” Meek said, surprise in her voice. “If there’s such things as ghosts and one did show up in my old house, it wasn’t Tommy. He was always much too lazy for that.”

  Ghost tours of the Sanderson Murder House are held Tuesday through Saturday at 7 and 9 p.m. for $20 per person. Groups of six or more can rent the house overnight for $428, $75 for each additional guest.

  Contact Bellamy at his website, www.sandersonmurderhouse.info.

  7

  The step didn’t take long. Cord crawled from underneath the wooden structure and stood, surveying the basement, a work bench island surrounded by a sea of electronic devices he not only didn’t want to activate, he didn’t want to touch. Especially the five-foot-tall circle rimmed with twisted copper wires like the inside of an electric motor. Mr. Sanderson had been a government scientist before he cracked; he apparently took his work home. None of the other owners or renters had been brave enough to touch the equipment either, so it had sat there since 1984 gathering dust and cobwebs; cobwebs Cord refused to clean. Cobwebs were ambience to a haunted house.

  The basement was a missed opportunity, he knew; something spooky in the basement could be icing on the paranormal cake. Sure, no one had been killed here on Delbert Sanderson’s mad rampage, but this machine, whatever it was, had never been mentioned in the newspapers, so he could call it anything he wanted. Too bad it gave him the creeps.

  “I could hook the washer and dryer up to timers,” he said to himself into the big, mostly empty room. “Or maybe one to make the light over the workbench pop on and off.” But those tricks would be carnival games compared to Delbert Sanderson’s stargate, or timegate, or bug zapper. This was why Cord hadn’t tackled the basement. He let people down there, sure, but offered no tricks. Ghost hunters knew finding anything supernatural was rare, so he was afraid of ratcheting up the action too much. Someone might become suspicious and as soon as his cover was blown, customers would stop coming, no matter how many people fell into his hallway.

  “Maybe—” he started, but an old picture frame stopped his thought. The frame that had come with the house, the one he left because it gave a feeling of authenticity, hung crookedly off a concrete screw over the work bench, the back bent, the glass dusty, but that didn’t matter. The size of the thing mattered, and it was about the size of the newspaper section that sat upstairs on the kitchen table. “Hey.”

  Cord set his hammer on the work bench. Lifting the frame off the screw, careful not to drop the glass onto the concrete floor, he took it upstairs. The step, third from the bottom, groaned as he walked over it. Success. If the newspaper fit, he’d hang it by the front door just like restaurants do when they get a good review. The Star story made his haunted house legitimate, but this would make it legitimate for visitors from out of town, telling them they were in an honest-to-God haunted house.

  He stepped into the kitchen and pushed the basement door closed with his foot. It swung shut quietly. Gotta work on that, too. If it creaks, they freak. The frame wasn’t exactly the same size as the newspaper, but close enough. A grin wiped across Cord’s face.

  “I’m just going to clean you,” he said, laying the frame on the table and lifting the paper. “And you’ll fit just like this.”

  He flipped the newspaper section and set it face-first on the glass. Eyes stared at him from the back page.

  “Holy shit.”

  8

  “Hmm.” Brick nodded slightly and turned to page D2, his eyes jumping to D3 before flipping the pages again.

  “Hmm?” the woman said. “You read the article, right?”

  Brick turned back to the front page before flipping to D4. “You mean the piece on Steely Dan? No. I didn’t go.”

  “No.” She rested her hands flat on the table and took in a deep breath. “I did, but it wasn’t Steely Dan, it was the Doobie Brothers.”

  He flipped back to page D1. “Says Steely Dan, here.”

  “Look, I know what i
t says,” she grumbled, then cleared her throat. “Sorry. I’m just a bit on edge.” She took a deep breath and began again. “I worked the concert. I heard them play ‘China Grove.’ Steely Dan doesn’t play ‘China Grove.’ The Doobie Brothers play ‘China Grove’. I might not like it, but that’s reality.” Although she didn’t know what reality was anymore.

  Brick lowered the paper enough to look at her, his eyes dark under those bushy eyebrows. “Then why does it say here it was Steely Dan?” He pulled the paper back up and flipped to page D6.

  She lowered her voice. “Why does a full-grown human simply vanish?” she asked, then pulled the newspaper down. “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m thinking about going to the movies tonight. I’m just seeing what’s playing.”

  She stood and looked at him over the top of the page, a frown on her lips, pleading in her eyes. But Brick didn’t see that, he didn’t look up. “The ghost story. Did you read the ghost story?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “And?”

  He shut the section to the back page. “Yes, I read the ghost story. It sounds like this ghost house guy saw the guy from the bar, the one who disappeared. The Oilyman.”

  “Oilyman?”

  Brick shrugged. “Yeah, that’s what I called him. You know, in my head. He came out of the bathroom covered in some kind of oil. It smelled like hydraulic fluid.”

  She sat back down. “Was he wearing a white shirt?”

  “White enough under the stains. And gray pants. Except—” Brick stopped. His face may have been pinched tight under all that beard, but it was hard to tell.