Neverworld Wake(44)
To my surprise, Martha raced over to the shelves and pulled out a hulking silver hardback book. Returning to the couches, she handed it to me. The cover featured a collage of birdcages, steam trains, men and women wearing top hats, masquerade masks straight out of Victorian England.
The Dark House of Elsewhere Bend by J. C. Gossamer Madwick.
The legendary cult saga of future pasts. Present mysteries. An undying love at the end of the world.
I flipped to the back flap and stared down at the author photo.
It was grainy and black-and-white. In a rumpled suit, Madwick was a man few would look twice at: hound-dog face, extravagant ears, an apologetic slouch suggesting he was more comfortable ducking out of a room than entering one.
Jeremiah Chester Gossamer Madwick (December 2, 1891–March 18, 1944) was an American novelist from Key West, Florida. His only work, the posthumously published The Dark House of Elsewhere Bend, won the Gilmer-Hecht Prize for Fantasy in 1968. For 37 years he worked as a bus driver for the Key West transit office, driving passengers to and from Stock Island by day, and writing his 1,397-page masterpiece by hand on hotel notepads by night. At age 53, he was found dead in the doorway of Hasty Retreat Saloon, a harmonica, a tin of tobacco, and the final paragraph of his novel in his pocket.
“Madwick died penniless and unknown,” Martha said. “Now he’s considered one of the greatest fantasy writers who ever lived. Harvard has an entire class about him: Hobos, Strangers, and Vagabonds: The Literature of Madwick. He even has a cult following in the real-life physics community due to his theory of time.”
She paused to hastily draw something in her notebook. It was a sketch of a train.
“Which brings me to Lesson Two,” she said. “Time travel. Madwick viewed time not as linear, or an arrow, or even a fabric, like Einstein. He saw it as a locomotive. To time travel in Elsewhere Bend, you climb out the window of your speeding train compartment and scale onto the roof, like a bandit in an old western. Then you carefully move toward the front of the train, the future, or the back of the train, the past. It’s vital not to move too quickly in either direction because that will cause instability. Like, the train can jump the tracks, or crash, or separate compartments, or veer suddenly onto a wrong track heading clear in the opposite direction.”
Shuddering in apparent horror at the thought of such a scenario, Martha took a deep breath and tucked her hair behind her ears.
“In the event of such disasters, you, the time traveler, are doomed. Because you’ll never be able to get your train back running on the original track, much less on time, much less climb back to the compartment in which you began. Although technically you can live the rest of your life in the past or future, the carriage where you were born, the original present, is where you belong. Always. That’s where life will be the smoothest journey for you. Where things work out and love lasts. A life lived at any other time will be restless, rough, ill fated. You can visit the past and the future, but you can’t stay there. Not if you want any chance at happiness.”
“What does this have to do with the Neverworld?” asked Cannon, uneasy.
“We want to interrogate Jim’s parents? I believe we can. We just have to choose a day in the close past or the future where we can reach them in the eleven point two hours of the wake. Then we find the open window in our train and climb out. And this open window…” She nibbled her fingernail. “It’s somewhere here. I don’t know where yet, but it’s a collision of life and death. It tends to be suicidal. In The Bend, the protagonist uncovers it by accident in Chapter One when he tries to commit suicide. And obviously none of us has ever committed suicide.”
I shook my head. So did Whitley, Cannon, and Kipling.
“So that rules that out,” Martha said gloomily. “We’ll have to locate the open window by some other means. Which brings me to Lesson Three.”
She cleared her throat. “The Neverworld was created not only by me, but by each of you. My biggest contribution is Madwick’s Dark House at Elsewhere Bend. But what about you? The closer you study the Neverworld, the more of yourself you’ll find. Your darkest secrets. Your worst nightmares. Your fears and dreams. The embarrassing thing you never want anyone to learn. It’s all here, buried, if you look close enough.”
An uneasy chill inched down my spine.
There was something threatening in the way she announced this. The others looked uncomfortable too. Whitley sat on the couch, motionless. Kipling looked pale. Cannon stared her down, completely absorbed.
Martha surveyed her notebook with a faint smile. “Kipling.” She cleared her throat. “I meant to ask you.” She held up a page where she’d drawn a red wasp. “The scarlet-bodied wasp moth. Native to Louisiana. I’ve spotted three at Wincroft. Two crawled out of the attic upstairs. Another from a radiator. They shouldn’t exist this far north. Do you recognize it?”
“How did you…?” blurted Kipling. He chuckled nervously. “Momma Greer used to catch them in mason jars. Kept them all around the house. Pit fiends, she called them. Said the sting was lethal and she’d put them on me while I slept if I didn’t sit still during church.”
Martha nodded blankly, unsurprised. She turned the page.
“Cannon. Surely you’ve noticed all the Japanese larch?”
He sat up, nervous. “The…what?”