Gatekeepers (9 page)

“They—” Xander started, then stopped. “What are you doing breaking into our house?”

“I'm sorry about that,” the old man said. “We wanted to call, but information gave us a 626 area code. That's not around here.”

“That's our old number,” David said. “In Pasadena. We just moved in.”

The old man nodded. “Information didn't give a new one. We drove straight from the airport. I . . . I wanted to get here as soon as possible.”

Xander said, “So you just barged in?”

Jesse looked up at them sheepishly. “Keal did knock.”

“Well, you can just wheel yourself right back—”

David elbowed his brother in the ribs. Hard.

Xander yelped.

David whispered, “There's something about him, Xander, can't you tell? I think he's on our side.”

“Dae, they
broke in
!”

The two boys looked over the handrail. Jesse was grinning as though he was the guest of honor at a surprise party.

“Who
are
you?” Xander said.

“Name's Jesse. This is my friend Keal.”

Xander leaned against the railing. “I heard, but
who are you
?”

“Unless I've miscalculated . . .” Jesse closed one eye as though he were struggling through a math problem. “I'm your great-great-uncle.”

CHAPTER

nineteen

W
EDNESDAY, 1.27 A.M.

David, Xander, and Toria stared down at the old man. They looked at one another.

“Come on,” Xander said. He slapped David's arm, grabbed his sister, and practically carried her down the hallway, out of sight of the intruders.

David's gaze connected with Jesse's. Something about the kindness David saw in the old man's face made him want to return it, however vague and unsupported by action it was. He held up his index finger. He said, “Be right back.”

“Take your time,” Jesse said.

When David reached Xander and Toria, he said, “I like him.”

“You don't know him,” Xander whispered. “If we're related, how come we've never met him before? How come we've never even heard of him?”

Toria skewed her face. “How's he
related
to us?”

“It'd be like . . .” Xander closed one eye, thinking, and David thought he looked an awful lot like Jesse at that moment. “Dad's dad's dad's brother. The brother of our great-grandfather.”

“Or great-grandmother,” David said.

From downstairs, Jesse called, “Great-grand
father
.”

Xander grabbed David and Toria's arms. He walked backward down the hall and into the boys' bedroom. “It's too weird,” he said. He looked at David. “Why is he showing up now, and how does he know us?”

“Maybe he's on Mom and Dad's Christmas card list,” David said.

“Then he would've known Toria too,” Xander said.

“What are you saying?” David asked. “He's an imposter?

Why?”

“To get in with us,” Xander said, as though it were obvious. “A spy. I wouldn't put it past Taksidian.”

“If Taksidian sent them,” David said, “why would he try to break in through the closet at the very same time?”

Xander's frown said
Good point
. “To scare us, show us how much we need an ally.”

“We already knew that,” David said.

Dad had told him that in old times when criminals were stoned to death, it didn't always mean having rocks thrown at them. Just as often, a condemned man would lie on his back, and a board was placed on top of him. Then people piled stones on the board until the collected weight crushed him down so firmly, his lungs could not expand and he would suffocate. The King family problems felt like that . . . like being crushed to death.

David said, “We need a
break
, Xander. Ever since we moved in, it's been one bad thing after another. Why can't something good happen for once?”

“Yeah,” Toria chimed in. “Why can't Jesse be here to help?”

“Maybe because he broke into our house?” Xander said. “At one thirty in the morning? Hmmm . . . yeah, that's normal.”

“Nothing about this house is normal,” David said. “When help comes, it'll
have
to be not normal.”

“David, you're being—” Xander stopped. He put his hand on David's shoulder. “You're right, we do need help. I just don't want to be . . . I don't know, so desperate for it that we take anything or anyone who comes along.”

“Can't we just talk to him?” David said. “Figure out if he's telling the truth?”

Xander nodded. He said, “Okay, but we stay together.”

In the hall, Xander picked up the toy rifle. They stopped at the top of the stairs. Keal was kneeling beside Jesse's wheelchair, one hand resting on the old man's shoulder. David noticed for the first time how pale Jesse looked. It made the moles—“age spots,” his dad had once told him—on Jesse's hands, face, and scalp stand out all the more.

“All right,” Xander told Jesse and Keal. “Go into the dining room, to the far side of the table.”

Jesse's brow furrowed. “What about your parents?” He read their expressions. “Aren't they here?”

“That's none of your business,” Xander said.

The old man nodded, and Keal wheeled him into the other room.
Eeek-eeek-eeek.
Chairs scraped against the dining room floor.

Xander went down the stairs, David and Toria moving right behind him like parts of a caterpillar. Xander wielded the makeshift club over his head and peered around the corner of the dining room before he walked in.

Jesse and Keal were sitting behind the table. Their hands were folded in front of them on the flat surface as though patiently waiting for dinner.

David brushed past Xander and took the chair opposite Jesse. The old man stared at him intently, but there was nothing mean about it. It was the way Mom and Dad looked at him sometimes—there was love behind it. But it
was
kind of odd to think that this stranger would
love
him.

Toria sat beside David. Her eyes darted between the two men. David figured she was doing what he'd already done: siz-ing them up, noting how different they were from each other, but somehow a team.

Like us,
he thought.

Jesse noted David's broken arm resting on the table. He studied David's face, the black eye and bruised cheek. “You guys look like you've been in a couple scrapes.”

When they didn't respond, he cleared his throat. “I can tell you're very capable children, and I am a guest in your house . . .” He looked each of them in the eyes. “But it's not right that I'm here, talking to you without your parents.”

“Well, all right, then,” Xander said. “See ya.”

“No, wait!” David said. He grabbed Xander's T-shirt.

“Xander, please.”

His brother frowned. He told Jesse, “Don't worry about our parents right now. We want to know more about
you
.”

“Fair enough,” Jesse said. “What do you want to know?”

“How did you get in?” Xander said. “The door was locked. Dad just had it rekeyed.”

“Oh,” Jesse said, “I know a few tricks about this place.”

David said, “How did you know about the little girl in World War II?”

“That was you, right?” Jesse said. “The one who saved her?”

David nodded. “There was a tank—”

“And you grabbed her before it ran her over,” Jesse said.

David's mouth fell open. “How . . . ?”

He looked at Xander, who was scowling at the old man.

“Two days ago, I woke up and the world was different,” Jesse said. “I mean, it had
changed
. You, David—you changed it.”

CHAPTER

twenty

W
EDNESDAY, 1:41 A.M.

“What do you mean, I changed the world?” David said.

Jesse rubbed the silver stubble on his checks. Folds of skin moved under his fingers. He said, “I'll show you.” He reached over his shoulder, groping for something on the back of the wheelchair.

Keal reached behind Jesse and produced a manila envelope. He handed it to the old man.

“Thank you, Keal,” Jesse said, flipping open the flap. He pulled out a piece of paper and slid it across the table toward David.

It was a photograph showing a farmhouse in the back-ground. In front was a family posing for the camera: a man, a woman, and a little girl.

David gasped. He picked it up and squinted at it. “That's her,” he said. He showed it to his brother. “Xander, that's the girl I saved from the tank!”

Xander took the photo, looked at it closely, then handed it back. He slid the chair around from the end of the table and dropped into it.

David said, “The man who took her from me said her name. Marge . . . Mag . . .”

“Marguerite,” Jesse said.

“Yeah.”

“Marguerite Rousseau.” The old man fished into the envelope again. He withdrew another piece of paper and said, “Do you know what smallpox is?”

“Like chicken pox?” David asked.

“Much worse. Blisters and a rash cover the skin, inside the mouth and throat. Very unpleasant. That's the common variety. Then there were the more severe strains. My friend Jeffrey Lewis was much younger than I. He was one of those people who kept you young just by being around, he was so full of energy. He contracted the hemorrhagic form of the disease on a mission trip. His skin turned black from all the bleeding of his organs and muscle tissue.” Jesse looked at Toria. “I'm sorry, sweetheart. Let's just say he suffered terribly. Jeffrey died on September 12, 1994.”

“Wait a minute,” Xander said. “I thought smallpox—”

Jesse held up his hand to stop him. His eyes were wet. “You have to hear this,” he said. “Earlier today, I spoke to my friend. I spoke to Jeffrey Lewis.”

David jumped as if Jesse had lunged out of his chair at him.

“What?” Xander said. “You talked to a guy who
died
in 1994?”

Jesse nodded. “At the airport in Chicago. Keal made the calls for me.”

“Tracked the guy down,” the younger man said. “When I made the connection, I put Jesse on.”

Jesse said, “I had a wonderful conversation with him. He's retired now. Wanted to tell me all about his grandkids.”

“You just said he died,” Xander said, obviously irritated.

“He did,” Jesse said, “in the world that existed three days ago. In today's world, he never died. He said the worst illness he ever had was a stomach bug years ago. I asked him.”

“That's . . .
impossible
,” David said.

Jesse said, “In the world you know, it is, but here—”

“Besides,” Xander interrupted, “I learned about smallpox.

It's been gone for . . . like forever.”

Jesse agreed. “The World Health Organization declared it eradicated on May 8, 1980.” He put the envelope and paper on the table and pressed his hand over them as though preventing them from flying away. “A couple of days ago, I had memories I no longer have. I wrote them all down.” He tapped his fingers on the paper. “I remembered the world—today's world—still suffering from smallpox. Two million deaths a year. The disease spared no one: children, parents . . . anyone could contract it, and an average of six in ten of those who did died of it.” He panned his eyes across the faces of the King children.

“So you had a dream,” Xander said.

“It wasn't a dream,” Jesse said. “It was a memory.”

“You probably remember polio too,” Xander said.

Jesse shook his head. “You don't understand. It was a memory, because three days ago, that's the way the world actually was. Smallpox had not been wiped out.
Two
days ago smallpox was gone—and had been gone for thirty years.”

“That doesn't make sense,” David said.

Jesse smiled. “Three days ago Marguerite Rousseau had died as a child, a casualty of the German war machine. But two days ago, she hadn't died—because
you
saved her. She grew up to perfect the vaccine that eliminated smallpox from our world.”

Xander sighed loudly. He leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair. “Like I said, I learned about how we beat smallpox when I was in seventh grade, three years ago. It didn't just change a couple days ago.”

“It did and it didn't,” Jesse said. He tilted his head toward one shoulder, then the other like a clock's pendulum. “The world changed when David saved Marguerite. That happened for David two days ago; it happened for Marguerite nearly seventy years ago. Everything became different the moment David saved her, the moment in
history
when he saved her.”

“I don't get it,” Toria said.

“Time travel is tricky business,” Jesse said. “Scientists argue about it. Most say it'd be impossible to change history, because the past is the past.”

“But you know better,” Xander said.

Jesse's head went up and down, slowly.

David pressed his chest into the table's edge. “I still don't get how you knew it was me who saved her and it was at that moment that history changed.”

“Some of us have a gift,” Jesse said. “We
sense
those changes. When the change occurs, the way things were
before
the change comes to us like a dream or almost-forgotten memory. After a couple of days, even
that
—the dream, the memory—fades. Then we're like everybody else: we don't remember that the world was ever any different. When I woke the other day, smallpox had been eradicated years before. But I had memories that it hadn't been. I knew someone had changed history. That's why I wrote my thoughts down—before they left my mind for good.”

He stopped, raising his head to listen to something David didn't hear. Then he did hear it: the house was groaning, a low, steady sound that reminded him of the way the trees around the house creaked in the wind.