The brush was thick in places, and without a light, it was hard to find the paths. I tried watching for the gleam of the flashlight through the trees, but saw nothing. He was keeping its use to a minimum. After ten minutes of wandering, I found myself back at the fence, having taken a wrong turning somewhere. I heard Cleo calling me from the house.
“Go call the police! They’ll help find him!” I shouted to her.
Then I went to resume the search. Remembering the snap, and the “X” by the fork in the creek, I trotted along the edge of the pasture next to the woods until I came to a dry wash that I knew led back to the creek. It was the long way around, but it was easy to follow the wash; and after a few minutes I stumbled onto the bank of the narrow stream. Then I waded upstream toward the fork. After twenty yards, I saw the flashlight’s gleam and heard the crunch of the shovel in moist ground. I moved as quietly as I could. The crunching stopped.
Then I saw him. He had dropped the shovel and was tugging something out of the hole. I let him get it out be-tore I called…
“Kenny…”
He froze, then came up very slowly to a crouch, ready to flee. He turned out the flashlight.
“Kenny, don’t run away from me again. Stay there. I’m not angry.”
No answer.
“Kenny!”
He called back then, with a quaver in his voice. “Stay where you are, Dad—and let me finish. Then I’ll go with you. If you come any closer, I’ll run.” He flashed the light toward me, saw that I was a good twenty yards away. “Stay there now…”
“Then will you come back to the house?”
“I won’t run, if you stay right there.”
“Okay,” I agreed, “but don’t take long. Cleo’s frantic.”
He set the light on a rock, kept it aimed at me, and worked by its aura. The light blinded me, and I could only guess what he might be doing. He pried something open, and then there was the sound of writing on tin. Then he hammered something closed, replaced it in the hole, and began shoveling dirt over it. Five minutes later, he was finished.
The light went out.
“Kenny…?”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t
I heard him slipping quickly away through the brush—back toward the pasture. I hurried to the fork and climbed up out of the knee-deep water, pausing to strike a match.
Something gleamed in the grass; I picked it up. Cleo’s kitchen clock, always a few minutes slow. What had he wanted with the clock?
By the time I tore through the brush and found the path, there was no sound to, indicate which way he had gone. I walked gloomily back toward the house, half-heartedly calling to Kenny… then… a flash of light in the trees!
BRRUUMMKP!
A sharp report, like a close crash of thunder! It came from the direction of the meadow, or the house. I trotted ahead, ignoring the sharp whipping of the brush.
“Kenny Westmore?… Kenny…”
A strange voice, a foreign voice—calling to Kenny up ahead in the distance. The police, I thought.
Then I came to the stone fence… and froze, staring at the think or perhaps at the nothing—in the meadow.
It was black. It was bigger than a double garage, and round. I stared at it, and realized that it was not an object but an opening.
And someone else was calling to Kenny. A rich, pleasant voice—somehow it reminded me of Doctor Jules, but it had a strong accent, perhaps Austrian or German.
“Come on along here, liddle boy. Ve fix you op.”
Then I saw Kenny, crawling on toward it through the grass.
“Kenny,
He got to his feet and stumbled on into the distorted space. It seemed to squeeze him into a grotesque house-of-mirrors shape; then it spun him inward. Gone.
I was still running toward the black thing when it began to shrink.
“Come along, liddle fellow, come mit oss. Ve fix.”
And then the black thing belched away into nothingness with an explosive blast that knocked me spinning. I must have been out cold for awhile. The sheriff woke me.
Kenny was gone. We never saw him again. Cleo confirmed what I had seen on the meadow, but without a body, Kenny remains listed as missing.
Missing from this century.
I went back to the fork in the creek and dug up the breadbox he had buried. It contained his stamp collection and a packet of famous autographs. There was a letter from Kenny, too, addressed to the future, and it was his will.
I paused to remember…
There was more to the note, but the gist of it was that Kenny had made an act of faith, faith in tomorrow. He had buried it, and then he had gone back to dig it up and change the rendezvous time from four months away to the night of his disappearance. He knew that he wouldn’t have lived that long.
I put it all back in the box, and sealed the box with solder and set it in concrete at the foot of a sixfoot hole. With this manuscript.
(To a reader, yet unborn, who finds this account in a dusty and ancient magazine stack:
Kenny is gone, and today there is a feeling of death in my house. But after a century of tomorrows? He invested in them, and he called out to them, pleading with the voice of a child. And tomorrow answered:
“Come, liddle boy. Ve fix.”
Anybody Else Like Me?
QUIET MISERY IN a darkened room. The clock spoke nine times with a cold brass voice. She stood motionless, leaning against the drapes by the window, alone. The night was black, the house empty and silent.
She was thirty-four, still lovely, with a slender white body and a short, rich thatch of warm red hair. She had a good dependable husband, three children, and security. She had friends, hobbies, social activities. She painted mediocre pictures for her own amusement, played the piano rather well, and wrote fair poetry for the University’s literary quarterly. She was well-read, well-rounded, well-informed. She loved and was loved.
Then why this quiet misery?
Wanting something, expecting nothing, she stared out into the darkness of the stone-walled garden. The night was too quiet. A distant street lamp played in the branches of the elm, and the elm threw its shadow across another wing of the house. She watched the shadow’s wandering for a time. A lone car purred past in the street and was gone. A horn sounded raucously in the distance.
