Twenty-five
Evie reached the castle overlooking Silver Ridge at
about midnight and found the door in the back of the garage opened for
her. Exhausted, followed by only a handful of Billy’s little machines,
she wove an unsteady path to her pink bedroom illuminated by light
sparkling through lead crystal and fell across her bed exhausted.
She awakened hours later and stripped off her dirtied
clothes and showered. She put on lacy underwear, a gown and a bathrobe
and curled back up in her bed. Wide awake now, she couldn't hope to
take further refuge in unconsciousness. Nothing Billy or Corin did would ever bring back Ella
May or Noah. Like a spark setting off a paper bag of firecrackers, events
were exploding in a chain-reaction, even events that seemed to have no
connection at all between one another.
“I’ll explain as best I can,” Billy’s soft
voice filled the air. “I’ll leave you alone until you say when.”
“Now,” she called out. “Do it now.”
After a time, the bedroom door opened. Billy walked
in and sat on the edge of her bed. He folded his hands in his lap and did
not try to reach for her as Billy would have done.
“In a way that’s hard to explain,” Corin said, “Billy
and I are the same person.”
One of his little machines rolled to
his side and stood
like a proud sentinel.
“I can’t be here without Billy’s active cooperation,
and Billy wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. Without you, his mind
would be in about the same shape as his legs.”
“What do you want?” she said softly. If Corin and
Billy were the same person, Billy wasn’t even sane.
“You must bear with me through a very difficult
explanation. I want to assure you before I begin that I have business to
attend to here in Silver Ridge that has nothing to do with you and Billy.
A very dangerous set of circumstances will culminate here in Silver Ridge,
and Billy made it possible for me to intervene. If I succeed in defusing
the situation, I’ll leave you and Billy to your private lives.”
Evie understood nothing of what he was saying. She
believed none of it.
Corin hung his head. “I know how I must sound. I
have nothing to offer but verbal assurances. It must seem to you that
Billy is very ill.”
“Does he know you’re here with me now?”
“No. At the core, we’re the same person, but we have
entirely different life experiences. My thoughts are based on my
experience, and his on his experience. Same body. Same consciousness.
Different frequencies, like different radio stations on one radio. You
only get one at a time.”
If she knew what questions to ask, she would have
asked them. But she could only stare up at him and wonder at the madness
of it all.
“Evie, I’m not part of the world that you know.
Billy will die someday, and he will live other lives in what you think of
as future eras. I could explain how it all works in terms of quantum
theory, but you don’t have the education to make sense of an explanation
as yet. The world is far more complex than you can imagine.”
“Does Billy believe you?”
Corin gestured to indicate the machine at his feet.
“Billy can see for himself what I am. He dares not doubt me. He can and
he does fear and distrust me.”
Corin leaned closer. “Listen to me, Evie. There is
no real division between Billy and myself, only a gulf of perspective.
The day will come when he will become what I am, and this moment will be a
memory of the past. In that future time, he will know himself as Corin.”
She had sensed this vulnerability in Billy when they
had first met, the danger of his life becoming more than he could handle.
“Did you have to kill Noah?” She said it to deliberately rattle him, to
see how his composure would hold up in the face of genuine horror.
Corin took something from his pocket and pointed it
at the television on the wall. An image took form, a dark picture of Noah
holding a gun and walking up behind Billy who was wearing a red robe and
sitting with his back to the intruder in the den.
“Turn it off.”
Corin paused the picture. “I would have been able to
reason with Noah, but he wasn’t alone. Noah would have listened to what I
had to say to him.”
“I know who Noah’s friends were. Turn it off.”
The monitor went dark.
Tears flooded her eyes. “Who hurt Ella May?”
“We had nothing to do with that.”
“Lazarus did it,” she spat. “I went to the store and
I couldn’t find her. Lazarus didn’t want me to go to her.”
“He would have killed you, too, if we hadn’t stopped
him.”
Evie wept for a time. Lazarus and Noah had finally
gotten away from Abe. Abe had told them they’d kill themselves if they
didn’t listen to him. She could imagine how awful Abe was feeling for his
failure, but it had been inevitable.
“Evie, we can’t hold you prisoner here. You’re free
to leave again if you wish. We won’t try to stop you.”
She stared at him, sensing Billy’s personality
contained within that older and wiser self. If this was madness, it was a
kind and compassionate madness. “Do you remember the day we met?” she
asked of him.
He sighed. “It was cold that day. Late May, but
the trees were green. The winter had been so bad that I just had to get
out of the house. I walked to town. You were coming out of the hardware
store as I passed. We almost bumped into one another.
“I knew you, Evie, the first time I saw you. And you
recognized me as well. You remembered me from whatever future you and
Billy will have together.”
A memory of the future? It was a romantic notion she
didn’t want to dismiss out of hand. Their initial confrontation had been
a special, once-in-a-lifetime experience for her as well.
“I did anything I could to hold onto you,” she said.
“I gave you everything I had to give, my mind and my body and my soul.”
She blinked away an onrush of tears. “I thought Lazarus had destroyed
everything.”
Corin started to reach for her. He thought better of
it and stood, taking a step away from her bed. “Evie, in my memory of my
past life as Billy Trevor, Lazarus never attacked us that night at the
mill. In my memory, the accident never happened. I remember Abraham
marrying Ella May. I remember you and I moving to Boston. Evie, I
remember our children.”
She stared at him in horrified disbelief.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That’s
what I’ve been trying to tell Billy. There’s an interference in this
place and time. None of this should ever have happened. The interference
originated in my world, and I’ve been sent to stop it. We stand in harm’s
way because it’s possible that I may fail. But I promise you that we
cannot escape it. If we don’t stop it here in Silver Ridge, it will grow
in size and fill every corner of any world that either of us will ever
know.”
“But you can stop it,” Evie said quickly, not daring
now to disbelieve.
Corin grew pale and tense. “Not without you and
Billy to help me. We have a chance. If we fail, the structure of our
lives will be altered. Nobody will die, because there is no death, but
our lives will become nightmares.”
