After Lark’s death, the subsequent separation and eventual divorce from her mother, the cabin had become Jim’s hide-away. In that first life, it had also been his bar and his confessional. But mostly, Jim liked to think of it as his pupae; the place where he had entered as a broken, disheartened, self-hating child-killer, and emerged as an almost-whole human, and critically acknowledged novelist.
Right now, it was just somewhere to start over.
Safe. Secluded. Quiet.
He had stayed with Simone’s parents for the first few weeks following the Slip; it seemed like the sensible thing to do, until some kind of normalcy returned to the world. But eventually he had moved back to the house on Keswick Street, in the hope that Simone would show up. Their house had survived the fire mostly intact, so he spent his days repairing the damage where he could, waiting and hoping for the day his wife and child would show up at the door.
As the days had turned into weeks with no word from Simone, and the repairs on the house were slowly completed, Jim had volunteered for clean-up duty. By this time, he had pretty much come to terms with the fact that they were probably dead, so he volunteered in the hope he might uncover some clue to Simone and Lark’s fate.
It took eight months to clear the freeways and streets of Los Angeles; to remove the bodies from the cars and trucks and bury them in mass graves. With each body he had pulled from the burned out shell of a vehicle, he wondered if it was maybe Simone or his daughter.
It fell to the operators of the mobile cranes and heavy-lifters to clear the tin-can-corpses of the hundreds of thousands of vehicles from the roads and freeways. The work had been soul destroying, painful, heartbreaking and horrible. But it was also a test of fire for Jim; a bridge from the old reality to the new, and Jim had made his way through it, coming out the other side more complete than when he had entered. The same couldn’t be said for many other survivors. Suicide rates in the first few months had grown to such massive levels that authorities had finally stopped counting. The media, in a rare show of clear-headedness in Jim’s opinion, had stopped reporting on it.
The cabin’s creosote stained logs looked welcoming and familiar after all the disquiet and horror he had experienced in those times. With the smell of sap and dry leaves redolent in the air, Jim pushed the key into the lock and opened the front door.
He stepped over the threshold to the accompanying Brak-rak-rak of a woodpecker somewhere deep in the surrounding forest.
Dust sheets covered the furniture, and the scent of undisturbed air hung heavy in every room. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed patiently. Well, at least the electricity is on, Jim thought as he carried his luggage into the front room. Later, he’d need to take a trip down to the store and grab some supplies.
Jim had always thought there was an odd sadness to a house that had been left vacant for a long period of time, an echoic air that extended far beyond the empty rooms and silence. It was temporal; as though the very walls had gone into hibernation, waiting for the owner to return, while at the same time, all the events that had ever taken place within them seemed frozen and available. It was as though he could reach out and pluck a single experience from the stillness. Jim felt that melancholia now as he moved from room to room checking the lights and windows, making sure all were working and intact. The place had a stillness that seemed more appropriate for a church than a home.
“Welcome home,” he said to himself.
For the next few weeks, Jim kept pretty much to himself. He explored the woods, fished the well-stocked lake.
Since he’d arrived at the cabin, Jim had found his thoughts frequently returning to the cause of the Slip. How had it happened? Was it manmade or some never before seen glitch in the clockwork mechanism of the universe? Or, was it as the Church of Second Redemption believed: that God had given humanity another shot, a second chance at their life? The answer eluded him, but the simple application of Occam’s razor meant he was erring on the side of manmade. Beside humanity’s ability to quickly adapt to new situations, Jim had long ago observed its propensity to royally screw things up just as easily.
When he distanced himself from the carnage that had been inflicted on the world, what was left was a fascinating conundrum that constantly plucked at his physicist’s mind. Time travel! Who would have thought it? It had long been seen as impossible within the scientific community, relegated to science-fiction novels and movies. But now it had been proven possible beyond a shadow of a doubt. Admittedly, it hadn’t happened played out in the way most science-fiction writers had imagined, but it had opened up a whole new frontier of possibilities for science. If it could be controlled it would become the most powerful tool humanity had ever created. Equally, it could also be the most terrible weapon, in the wrong hands.
That was assuming anyone could ever figure out just how it had happened, in the first place.
Strange how quickly the human mind could adjust to even the most seemingly outrageous of situations, Jim thought, as he walked back from the lake. He had a four-pound trout stowed in the ice box he carried in one hand, a tackle-box and fishing pole in the other. Still deep in thought, Jim mounted the back steps to the cabin, kicked off his boots and waders, and set his fishing pole and equipment down on an easy-chair where he spent his evenings watching sunsets.
He pulled open the screen-door and stepped into the mud room. As if sensing his presence, the phone in the living room began to ring, demanding his attention. He strode toward the noise. He hadn’t given the landline number to anyone, so it had to be a wrong number.
“Hello?” said Jim, into the phone’s receiver.
“James Baston?” a man’s voice asked.
“Who is this?”
At the other end of the phone line, the voice paused for a second before continuing. “My name is Doctor Mitchell Lorentz, and I have an offer that, I hope, you will not want to refuse.”
Twenty-One
The sound of gravel crunching under tires alerted Jim to the arriving vehicle. It was exactly 11:00 am—his visitors were precisely on time— and Jim wondered whether the car had been idling on the approach to the lake house just so they could put in a punctual appearance.
Jim opened the front door and raised his hand in acknowledgment to the man exiting the passenger side of the vehicle as it pulled to a stop in the driveway. The car was a black Lincoln town car with government plates and tinted windows that obscured the driver. The passenger was a tall well-built man in army dress uniform who strode across the gravel approach with the confidence and bearing that only comes from years of military training and intense discipline.
“Mr. Baston? Colonel Geoffrey DeWitt,” he said, thrusting out a meaty hand. “Do you have any baggage, Sir?”
“Just these,” said Jim pointing over his shoulder to a suitcase and a travel bag leaning against the wall of the hallway. DeWitt picked them both up and took them to the back of the car, placing them in the trunk as Jim followed behind him.
“Doctor Lorentz has asked me to give you this, Sir,” said DeWitt, handing Jim an oversized manila envelope with the words top secret stamped in thick, outsized bright red ink across the face of it, and an embossed US Government seal in the top right corner. “He would like you to read it en route,” continued the colonel as he opened the rear passenger door and indicated for Jim to climb in.