“Thank the Lord, ’cause I need my beauty sleep,” said Kip with a yawn.
We piled into the Jaguar.
The problem was, no matter how many times Whitley pressed the buttons on the console screen, the convertible top wouldn’t go up. It wouldn’t go up manually either.
Cannon volunteered to drive, but Whitley insisted. It began to pour, so hard there was more rain in the air than air. The thirty-five-minute ride home was this terrible ordeal, all of us in the backseat hunched together, drunk and freezing. At one point Martha threw up all over her feet, all of us shivering under E.S.S. Burt’s creepy London Fog trench coat, which Whitley had found in the trunk. Whitley began to cry that she couldn’t see the road. Tearing around a curve, we nearly collided with a tow truck.
The driver blared his horn. Whitley jerked the wheel, tires screeching. Everyone screamed as we barreled off the road, bouncing to a halt in a ditch, Kip hitting his head on the seat. Killing the engine, Whitley started to sob, screaming at Cannon that it was all his fault, that as always he’d needed to impress a bunch of girls just to massage his screaming insecurity for five minutes and now we’d almost died. She snatched his baseball cap off his head and threw it into the dark. Then she scrambled out, shouting that she was finding her own ride home, running into the woods. I sensed her tantrum had to do with the rain and almost ending up in a car accident—but also with me, how I’d shown up out of the blue.
Cannon went after her. A few minutes later, he brought her back. She was crying and wearing his hoodie. He tucked her carefully, like some wild bird with a broken wing, into the front seat, whispering, “It’s gonna be all right, Shrieks.”
It was Cannon who got us home.
As the five of us went clambering into Wincroft, dripping wet and drunk, it felt normal for the first time. It felt like the old days. Thank goodness for the defunct top on that convertible. Our brush with death had thawed the ice. We were giddy, teeth chattering as we pulled off our wet clothes, leaving them in a soggy pile on the floor, which Gandalf kept circling while whining. Whitley disappeared upstairs. Martha was on her hands and knees in front of the fireplace, moaning, “I can’t feel my legs.” Cannon went down to the wine cellar, returning with four bottles of Chivas Regal Royal Salute, and poured shots in pink champagne glasses. Whitley dumped a giant mound of white terry-cloth bathrobes on the couch like a pile of dead bodies.
“I’ve never been so scared in my whole life,” she said, giggling.
That was when the doorbell rang.
We all sat up, staring at each other, bewildered. Mentally counting. We were all here.
“Someone call Ghostbusters?” slurred Martha.
“I’ll go,” volunteered Cannon. A sloppy salute, and he disappeared into the foyer. None of us said a word, listening, the only sound the rain drumming on the roof.
A minute later, he was back.
“It’s some old geezer. He’s two hundred years old.”
“It’s Alastair Totters,” said Martha.
“Who?” Cannon snapped.
“Time-traveling villain in The Bend,” mumbled Martha.
“No, no,” whispered Kip, gleeful. “It’s the proverbial kook with Alzheimer’s who wandered away from his nursing home during Elvis Social Hour. Without his medication. They’re always without their medications.”
“I’ll invite him in for a nightcap?” asked Cannon, sighing, a mischievous wink.
“No,” hissed Whitley. “That’s how horror movies start.”
“Chapter three,” Martha muttered.
“Hey,” said Cannon, pointing at Wit. “That’s not very nice. I’m inviting him in—”
“NO!”
Then we were all racing, giggling, tripping over each other as we bumbled to the foyer to see for ourselves, tying up our bathrobes, taking turns to check the peephole, bumping heads. I assumed Cannon was somehow playing a trick on us, that no one would actually be there.
But there he was. An old man.
He was tall, with thick silver hair. Though I couldn’t make out his face in the shadows, I could see that he was dressed in a dark suit and tie. He leaned in, smiling, as if he could see me peering out.
Cannon opened the door with a bow.
“Good evening, sir. How may we help you?”
The man didn’t immediately speak. Something about the way he surveyed us—methodically inspecting each of our faces—made me think he knew us from somewhere.
“Good evening,” he said. His voice was surprisingly rich. “May I enter the premises?”
No one answered, the question being too presumptuous and strange. I gathered he was not senile. His eyes—deep green, gleaming in the porch light—were lucid.
“Oh, you live next door,” said Whitley, stepping beside Cannon. “Because if this is about Burt’s sailboat, the Andiamo, being marooned in front of your dock, he told me to tell you he had problems with the anchor and he’s working on getting a tow next week.”
“I do not live next door.”
He stared at us another beat, his face expectant.
“It’s really best if I come inside to explain.”
“Tell us what you want right there,” said Cannon.
The man nodded, unsurprised. It was then that I noticed two bizarre things.
One: he looked like Darrow’s musical director, Mr. Joshua. For a moment my drunken mind believed that it was Mr. Joshua, that something terrible had happened to him in the year since I’d last seen him. He’d suffered some tragedy and aged twenty-five years, his hair going silver, his face growing tattered. But it wasn’t Mr. Joshua. Mr. Joshua was slight and rosy, quick to laugh. This man was bony, with a hawkish face, one that would look at home on foreign currency or atop a monument in a town square. It was as if he were the identical twin brother of Mr. Joshua, as if they’d been separated at birth and had totally different life experiences, Mr. Joshua’s nurturing and this man’s harrowing, bringing him to look the way he did.
Two: there was no car in the driveway, so the question of how he’d come here without an umbrella yet remained perfectly dry hung in the air, vaguely alarming, like a faint odor of gas.
“You’re all dead,” he said.
“Oh, dear. You’ll have to excuse me. That’s not accurate.”
The old man placed a hand over his eyes, shaking his head. “I overshot it. Went for the dramatic, Masterpiece Theater effect. I apologize. Let’s try that again, shall we?”
He cleared his throat, smiling.
“You’re all nearly dead. Wedged between life and death. Time for you has become snagged on a splinter, forming a closed-circuited potentiality called a Neverworld Wake.”
Quite pleased now, he nodded and took a deep breath.
“This phenomenon is not specific to you. There are such moments occurring simultaneously in the past, present, and future all around the world and across the universe, known and unknown, crumpled and unfolded. Time does not travel in a straight line. It bends and barrels across tunnels and bridges. It speeds up. Slows down. It even derails. Well then. This hitch, as we might call it, is where each of you exists at the moment. And it is where, until further notice, you will remain.”
He bowed like the longtime ringmaster of a down-at-heel traveling circus, with gracious ease and a hint of exhaustion.
“I am the Keeper,” he said. “I have no other name. The way I look, act, the tone of my voice, my walk, face, everything I say and think is the sum total of your five lives as they were lived. Think of an equation. This moment equals your souls plus the circumstances of reality. Another example? Imagine if each of your minds was placed inside a blender. That blender is turned on high. The resulting smoothie is this moment. If there were someone else with you? It would be a slightly different moment. I’d be saying something else. I’d have different hair. Different hands. Different shoes. Docksiders rather than Steve Maddens.
“I digress. The circumstances of reality. You’re doubtlessly wondering what I meant by that. Well.”