“Are you telling me Dad was a ghost hunter?”
Klimt flapped a dismissive hand. “That would be a minor strand of our work. Unexplained incidents, cryptic occurrences, and relative nontemporal events. That is what we investigate.” He produced a business card from his jacket and held it between his first two fingers.
Hesitantly, I took it from him. The only word on it was UNICORNE, in embossed silver letters that almost disappeared into the white of the card. Below the name was the image of the rearing black unicorn. I couldn’t understand at first why an E had been added to the end of UNICORN. Then I worked out that the looping e in the tail of the horse was there for exactly that reason. I also began to see an acronym in the name. UNexplained Incidents, Cryptic Occurrences … even down to the final three letters. “What is a Relative Nontemporal Event?” I remembered his mentioning this on the bench.
He put the remainder of the orange aside and patted his lips with a corner of the napkin. “Tell me what happened with the dog. This is your side of the agreement. It does not matter how ridiculous it seems. I have encountered many strange phenomena in my time. Please, hold nothing back.”
So I told him what I knew, or what I could remember. Everything from the asthma diagnosis to sensing the husky’s thoughts and rescuing it. I spoke for several minutes, and in all that time, he never interrupted, as if he had a tape recorder running in his head. Finally, when I was beginning to ramble, he held up a hand to tell me to stop.
“Was this the first occasion you’d experienced such a shift?”
Shift? What was that supposed to mean? “Um, yes. I think so.”
He synchronized his fingertips and tapped them together. “Have you spoken to anyone else about this?”
I shook my head.
“What about the journalists?”
I lifted my shoulders. “They asked some questions and took some stuff from my sister’s phone, but —”
“Photographs?”
“Yes. But they were useless. Blurred.”
He made a slight humming sound as he traced the angle of his throat with a finger, his purple eyes fixed on the space in front of him.
“We didn’t give permission.”
“It does not matter,” he said, without moving his gaze. And then he changed the subject. “Tell me something; be as honest as you can. Do you ever think you sense your father’s presence?”
That made me sigh. I rolled my head against my shoulder and tried to look out the window again. So many times since Dad’s disappearance I’d walked past his room, hoping he’d spring out and hug my shoulders. “Want to go outside and kick a ball around, Mikey?” That was the kind of thing he would say. That was the dad I knew and loved. The dad I remembered. The dad I wanted back. But did I ever sense him? No, not really. I said to Klimt, “Why are you asking me this? What’s Dad got to do with me saving the dog?”
He picked out his fob watch and checked the time. “Please answer the question, Michael.”
“No,” I said irritably. “No, I don’t feel him.” I crossed my arms tight, smothering the need to strike at something. I’d tried so hard to shut all of this out, the aggression I felt toward Dad sometimes, the blame I attached to him for letting us down. “How did you get him?”
“Get him?” Klimt repeated.
“How did he come to work for you? What could he do, this dad I never knew?”
Klimt tapped a finger against his thigh. It seemed to mesmerize me slightly, like a dripping tap. “Your father was a talented software engineer. We heard about him from another source and engaged him to work on a new design project. He was so far ahead of others in his field that we invited him into our UNICORNE facility, where he agreed to take some tests. We soon discovered a number of remarkable talents. For instance, he could accurately gauge an individual’s mood and know, with certainty, if they were lying or telling the truth. This is a valuable skill to possess — especially when probing accounts of paranormal activity.”
“How?” I asked. “How did he do it?”
“He was able to detect minute variations in the pigmentation of a person’s iris, the circle of the eye that is colored. He called it flecking. Try it sometime, on someone you trust.”
“You think I could tell when people are lying?”
“With training, yes. But that is just the tip of your … potential, Michael. I believe you have inherited your father’s abilities but taken them to new and higher levels. Do you know what a multiverse is?”
This sounded like physics. Not my best subject.
Klimt read my face and smiled. “I will explain,” he said. “Some scientists believe that our world is made up of an infinite number of universes, linked so closely that a simple decision — say, choosing to eat an orange or not — might involve our entering a parallel universe and setting off a whole new chain of events. If I eat the orange, for instance, I might spill some of the juice onto my suit. So I decide to take the suit to be cleaned, and as I’m crossing the road to the dry cleaner, I’m hit by a bus. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“None of this happens if you don’t eat the orange.”
“Correct. But the possibility that it could happen is always present somewhere in the multiverse.”
“So …?”
“So imagine you had the power to affect the multiverse, to rearrange its layers to achieve a desired outcome.”
“That would make you … king of the world,” I said.
“A little poetic, but yes. And what if I told you you’d done this twice — as easily as flipping through the pages of a book?”
I snorted a laugh. Okay, some weird stuff had happened in the last two days. But hopping between universes? That sort of thing only worked in comics. “That’s crazy. No one can mess with … the future.”
“Then we need to continue driving,” he said, “until you are convinced. Meanwhile, there is one thing I can tell you with certainty.”
“What’s that?”
“You do not have asthma.”
“It’s really quite simple to understand,” said Klimt as the car continued its circuit of Holton. “Yesterday, on this headland, you made contact with the raw emotions of an animal, one so deeply distressed that you suspected it was ready to leap off a cliff. You pictured yourself saving it. Am I correct?”
“Yes, but —”
“In that moment, when your level of concern for the dog was so great, something quite extraordinary happened. Somehow, you separated your imagined reality from your physical one. You followed the path of your projected thoughts and created the outcome you desired to see happen. We have a word for this: We call it imagineering.”
“So I … what … traveled through time?”
“Momentarily, yes. I believe your consciousness moved to a future point just ahead of the dog’s intended leap. To complete the action, your physical body then needed to catch up so the time frames might be realigned. To an external observer, it would appear that you vanished from one location and instantly materialized in another. This was reflected in the words of the policeman who was interviewed at the scene.”
A superhuman force, he’d said. It made my skin prickle just thinking about it.
“And Dad could do this?”
“Yes, but it was flawed and unpredictable. We believe your father might have ‘traveled’ in the same way you did — but the time frames somehow failed to realign.”
“You mean … he’s lost in time?”
“That would be the simplest way of putting it, yes. Now, I need to ask you something important. Think carefully before you answer. This may require intense concentration. Since the original shift, have you noticed any changes in your circumstances? Anything unusual, no matter how small?”
At first I was going to tell him no. Apart from saving the dog and playing witness to a fabricated double murder, the last two days had been pretty average.
Then I remembered Josie and the flute.
I told him about the flute case
and her school rehearsal. How Josie telling the police about her music exam was the last thing I’d been thinking of before I went after the dog.
Once again, he stared into the middle distance, as if his brain was searching for another gear. “Yet you seem to recollect that, until this time, your sister had no talent for the instrument?”
“I think so. I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to remember.” Like a crumb falling off the edge of a plate. “She does play now, though. She’s really good.”
“Fascinating,” he said. His left eye flickered, not unlike an LED on a computer. “Your sister’s invention has become a valid part of your altered reality. That is quite a feat.”
He leaned forward and tapped the screen. The barrier stayed up, but the deepening hum from the automatic gearbox suggested we were done and I would now be taken home.
“Is that it?” I said. I felt a little cheated. I had told him a lot; he had told me very little.
“Yes,” he said. “You may return to your family.”
“But … what about Dad?”
“What about him, Michael?”
“You said I could find him. What do I do?”
“Nothing,” he said. “You do nothing about your father, unless we request it. UNICORNE will continue the search for now.”
So why was I even in the car? “No. I need to know where he is, Mr. Klimt. You have to let me help you. You have to. Please.”
“And how do you propose I go about this?”
“Do tests. Whatever. Like you did with Dad. Let me be a part of your organization. Make me a member of UNICORNE.”
He looked down into his lap and smiled. “You would be a boy in an unsafe world. You have no idea what dangers could await you.”
“I don’t care. I’ll do anything to get Dad home. Let me prove myself to you. Give me a mission. There must be something I can do.”
The car rolled to a halt.
“Please, Mr. Klimt.”
His eyes looked up to a gap in the screen, a signal to the driver not to open the door yet. “Very well,” he said. “I will give you a task. But there are rules, Michael. Serious rules. If you break them, you will put yourself in jeopardy, and all chance of finding your father will be gone. There are people out there, other organizations, who would stop at nothing to access your abilities. This episode with the dog will not have gone unnoticed.”
I gulped and gave a quick nod.
“Rule number one. You do not speak about UNICORNE to anyone, not even to your family, and certainly not to your friends. Anything you find, you share only with me, Chantelle, or Mulrooney. Do I have your word on this?”
“Yes. Where do I start?”
“Find out about the dog.”
The dog? No evil villains or burning helicopters or secret underground particle colliders? Just find out about the stupid dog? “Why? What for?”
“There is a reason it was alone on the cliff. Something about that dog triggered a powerful reaction in you. I’m interested to know what made you connect.”
He nodded at the screen. My door clicked open.
“But … it was just a dog, being a dog and stuff.”
“That is all, Michael. Now you may go — unless you’d like my driver to haul you out?” He pointed to the outside world.
I sighed and stepped out of the car. But before they could close their automated door, there was one more question I needed to ask, perhaps the biggest question of all. “What was Dad’s mission? Why did UNICORNE send him to New Mexico?”
“Good-bye, Michael,” Mr. Klimt said. “I’ll contact you again when the moment is right. Oh, one last word of warning: Be careful what you wish for — it might come true.”
“Wait!” I cried as the door clicked shut. “How do I contact you if I need to? And how am I supposed to find Chantelle?” But by then the car was halfway up the road. And Amadeus Klimt was gone.
They had dropped me off behind a sprawling hedge, fifty yards away from the side of our house. My uniform, although it had dried out a little, was still in a terrible state. There was nothing else for it but to go and face Mom.
I didn’t even make it as far as the front door.
Halfway up the drive, she appeared on the step.
“Mom,” I began.
“Don’t even try. Just get inside, get upstairs, and get those clothes off. You are in such deep trouble, young man. I’ve had the school on the phone, the police have been here, and that photographer from the paper has been sniffing around again.”
“Eddie? What did he want?”
“I don’t know, Michael. And I don’t really care. What in heaven’s name were you thinking of, taking the scooter like that?”
“Mom, I — How did you know I’d been on the scooter?”
“Don’t test my patience,” she threatened. “Inside. Upstairs. Shower. Now.”
And really, what was the point of arguing?
I dragged myself past her, half expecting a slap around my ear. But all I could feel was her disappointed shudder. If only I could tell her.
What a day.
I clumped upstairs, pulling off my tie and loosening my jacket. As I turned on the landing, I walked past the bathroom, where I would be spending the next twenty minutes trying to find a way to sluice myself into a gutter, no doubt.
Precisely one step past the bathroom door, I stopped, rocked back, and pushed the door open.
She gave me a look that suggested she’d like to rip out my heart with a garlic press.
“What are you doing here?” I gasped.
She scowled and replied, “What does it look like?”
It looked like Chantelle, being an au pair.
Folding my boxers into a pile to be washed.
At first glance, my life was exactly the same as it had been just before I’d taken the scooter. My toothbrush was still in its place on the rack. My soccer cleats had a large hole in the toe. My secret stash of quarters was huddled in a sock at the back of my drawer. Everything was how it ought to be. Normal. But, as with Josie and the flute, changes had been made. They were all built around the thoughts I’d been holding at the forefront of my mind when I’d gone through the “shift” that Klimt had talked about — the need to escape from the men in dark glasses, and the weird idea that Chantelle was our au pair. To use his words, she was now “a valid part of my altered reality.”
Fantastique? Not.
She had the spare room at the top of the stairs but shared our space like the big moody sister any self-respecting boy would have gladly locked away in the attic on a bet. She didn’t want to talk about Klimt or the scooter (in the garage for repairs to its bodywork and mirror), other than to say that if I ever took a “joyride” on it again, she would do unspeakable things to me. The threat was delivered in a huffy form of French, most of which I worked out by inference. I might have imagineered these cozy domestic circumstances for her, but it hadn’t improved her Gallic sulks. Under pressure, I did question the joyride element, only for Mom to wade in hard and accuse me of stealing the bike to show off. My “fame,” she accused me, had gone to my head. And the weird thing was, it all made sense. The more they gave of their version of events, the more it reinforced the new reality, and the harder it became to remember (or believe) what used to be. By the end of the day, it felt as though Chantelle had always been part of the family, chatting about Paris and fashion with Josie and easing the full-time burden on Mom. I might have stepped into a parallel universe, but it was an incredibly familiar one that everyone around me was comfortable with.
There were repercussions, of course. I would be grounded for “as long as it took,” and a large portion of my weekly allowance would go to Chantelle until the repair costs were fully paid back. That was fine. I could deal with that. What I found so much harder to accept was that my whole relationship with Mom had turned sour. An invisible line had been drawn between us. I was now the “hormonal” son. I’d earned myself the label “troublesome teen.”
At
school, that point was hammered home with venom. My first stop the next morning was not chemistry with Mr. Boland but an audience with Mr. Solomon, the principal, a man who had very little “chemistry” with anything but orcs, hobgoblins, and gargoyles.
He didn’t seem to care about my taking the scooter. If I wanted to kill myself or rack up an adolescent criminal record, that was my silly business, he said. For him, it was all about dishonoring the school and the sudden deviation from the norm. He, too, had read about my “stunt” on the cliff. In the space of twenty-four hours, I’d gone from model pupil to juvenile delinquent. I was offered the chance to explain myself. I couldn’t. The first rule of UNICORNE was you did not talk about UNICORNE, right? So I acted the part of the sullen schoolboy and grunted and shrugged and pretended to be bored. Then came the lecture, followed by the punishment. It was mild.
“I’m giving you a verbal warning. Any repeat of this behavior will mean a suspension. A formal letter will be sent to your mother. Now get out.”
Thank you very much, Chantelle.
I stepped out of the office, dragging what was left of my pride behind me. And who should be in the corridor, waiting, but …
“Freya!” I gasped.
She stared through her spikes of gelled black hair. She really was everything the other kids joked about. A moody, disaffected, shabbily dressed girl with a face the color of vanilla sorbet. The skin beneath her eyes was sagging like a curtain coming off its rail. She looked as if she hadn’t slept for a year, but at least she hadn’t died at the bottom of a cliff (unless Garvey had been right about the vampire thing).
Mrs. Greaves, the principal’s secretary, walked past en route to the photocopier. She tapped Freya’s shoulder and said, “Your turn.”
Freya rolled out her tongue and removed a wad of limp gray gum from her mouth. Out of sight of Mrs. Greaves, she pressed it behind the stump of a yucca plant. I smiled, wondering if she’d pick it up when she was through with Solomon. “What have you done?” I whispered.
She stuck her chin in the air and turned her gaze away. But there was just enough interest in her tired brown eyes to encourage me to ask, “Is Trace okay?”