The Curiosity Killers (9 page)

Hell of a thing. What did I really do while I was away? Did I learn whether Patty Hearst was in on her kidnapping? Did I thwart some murder plot to assassinate a king in the 1500s? Or do I know where a centuries-dead pirate buried his treasure? The mind reels.

Cob would feel a scratching at the inside of his brain, like insects seeking exit from a glass jar. Then he’d spend a few hours in meditative pondering before offering up a mild shrug and continuing on his day.

Now he read the manual a seventh time, receiving coffee from the efficient and beautiful Miss Moto and warnings from the sad-eyed Mister Jonson at regular intervals. Jonson himself was a bit of a downer, with his dark eyes cast to the floor and muttered warnings of things. At last the physicist, Doctor Vere, entered and led Cob downstairs.

“You must forgive me if I seem too casual in my instructions for you,” Vere rumbled in a deep voice. “It’s just that, as you now know, you’ve been our client for so long…from
our
perspective, we feel as if this should all be old hat for you, lad.” Vere chuckled. It was a rusty enough sound that Cob suspected it was rare to hear the scientist express mirth.

“Indulge me,” Cob told Vere. They’d reached the bottom of the spiral staircase and stood in a crowded laboratory. “They tell me I have a bit of a memory problem.” He barked out a boisterous laugh that in all other company never failed to be infectious, but Vere did not join him. Cob quieted and looked around.

Buzzkill
.

“So…do I need some new threads? Things that won’t make me stick out? I don’t know the drill, but I’m sure you’re about to tell me you’ve run me through it before.”

“That’s step one, yes,” Vere replied. “Let me see, let me see. Nineteen…when is it again you’re going? Ah, yes.” He rummaged through a sheaf of papers and nodded. “Off to wardrobe with us.” Vere canted his head toward a darkened hallway to the left of the main room and shuffled off. “Benoy left instructions on the style. He’s quite the thorough researcher. You’ll want to be completely inconspicuous, so we’ve got to outfit you with things that will work for multiple occupations.
Blend in
. This is not the time to express yourself, as you apparently do in your daily life.” Vere nodded with a raised eyebrow at Cob’s garish attire.

Cob shrugged, confident in his personal sartorial choices. Spats and velvet were always appropriate these days. The velvet in particular was important, because it tended to make ladies want to touch him.

“Location matters, too, I expect,” Cob remarked. The two men were now in a wider hallway with racks of garments on either side. The elbows of Cob’s jacket brushed against something dusty that made him stifle a sneeze. “What’s formal in Jersey might not be so formal in Paris, y’know?”

“Indeed, indeed.” Vere produced a bag from one of the racks. “You’ve actually used this same suit before for a similar time period, so I hope you haven’t drastically changed sizes since then.”

Cob took the bag. Black plastic covered the contents, but through the zippered hole in the top he could make out dark wool. “Feels heavy. This stuff gonna slow me down if I have to make a run for it? Is it liable to be too hot?”

“It will be late in the year, when we send you,” Vere said. “Nearly wintertime, and decades before the seasonal designations ceased to mean much. You should be quite comfortable.”

“Right, the first sighting…well, the bridge collapsed at Christmastime,” Cob muttered, more to himself than to Vere. “But it’s the south…”

“It’s only too warm for that sort of clothing in the
deep
south. You aren’t going into Alliance states, after all,” Vere said. “Now, get changed and return to the main room. Be quick about it.”

Vere returned to his lab, leaving Cob alone.

Christmastime
.
The folks who had premonitions of the disaster reported having dreams about presents bobbing up and down in the water.

He shut his eyes. That was the part of this trip, this mystery, he didn’t like thinking about. It wasn’t so much the bridge failure that concerned him, it was what else appeared that strange late autumn and early winter of 1966. Monster hunting was glamorous; a disaster that killed almost fifty people, not so much.

Cob took the dark plastic off the hanger and whistled when he saw the outfit. He imagined this was where some of the myths come from. How many of these dudes in black suits were time travelers?

He stepped out of his crimson trousers and purple jacket, keeping on his plain white dress shirt, and pulled on the replacement clothing. There was a full-length mirror in an attached dressing area, and Cob sauntered over to it as he tightened his necktie. He brushed dust out of his straight dark hair and stroked the three-day growth of scruff that filled the hollows of his cheeks.

Might want to shave
.
They’ll give a lotta side-eye to someone who’s not all boring and clean-cut.

In the pocket of the black blazer was a pair of vintage Ray Bans with perfectly opaque lenses. Cob set them on the bridge of his nose and took in the effect.

Man in black
.
I am an honest-to-goodness man in black. God, this is about as far from inconspicuous as you can get.

He exhaled a short laugh and put the shades back in the jacket pocket.

In the lab, Vere turned dials and tapped the screens of level meters. “You ready, Mister Cob?” he asked.

“Think I need a shave,” Cob replied.

Vere cast a quick glance over his shoulder. “Upstairs. Benoy keeps a kit in the smaller lavatory. Miss Moto will show you.”

Cob jogged up the winding metal staircase and almost collided with another figure. A feminine voice let out a squeak, and Cob took a step backward.

“I’m so sorry.”

“No, my fault, my fault.”

Cob blinked, expecting to see that he’d nearly run into Miss Moto, she of the sleek dark hair and excellent hot drink service, but it was someone else. This woman was older than the secretary, though only by a few years, and had shoulder-length platinum hair. She wore some sort of nondescript overalls, liberally streaked with oil or grease along the front, and had a rolled-up blue bandana holding her bangs away from her forehead.

“Damn, my office clearly needs a new IT department if I can hire folks who look like you,” Cob remarked before thinking the words through.

“Excuse me?” The woman’s pale skin turned rosy.

He shook his head. “Sorry, sorry, I just…you, ah, you work here? I’m looking for the head. The…ah, that sounded gross. The restroom. You an employee?”

“No, I’m a…oh! Are
you
a client?” The woman laughed. “We probably shouldn’t be talking. It was in the manual, wasn’t it? Or…do you…”

“Right, yes, no. We probably shouldn’t be talking,” Cob agreed. They both laughed again, and the woman disappeared into the conference room.

I never literally bump into chicks that hot
.
Wonder where she went.

He found the bathroom on his own and shut the door. On a small shelf mounted above the sink, he spotted a mug of soap and shaving brush. A few more moments’ searching revealed a half-empty bag of disposable razors in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror.

Cob wet the brush and placed it in the mug of soap, swirling it around until lather formed. Where would a girl like that need to wear a pair of overalls? And, damn, did she fill ’em out nice. What did she do where she would get all greasy? Based on how she was dressed, maybe she’d been polishing the landing gear of the Spruce Goose. Cob wondered if he’d ever satisfied his curiosity about Amelia Earhart, given all the jaunts he couldn’t remember. Were there times he was told a trip wasn’t a good choice? They were letting him go to West Virginia, so he must not have learned about this particular mystery already.

Cob imagined red eyes glowing in the dark. He slid the protective plastic off the razor and shaved. Even as he watched the dusting of whiskers disappear from his face, he still imagined those eyes, the wingspan reports cited, a hulking thing stepping out in front of a car…

I have to know
.

He rinsed off the razor and thumbed one cheek’s worth of hair onto the white porcelain below. How could someone hear a mystery without needing to know the truth, even if the truth is a bunch of bored kids putting on crazy outfits and walking around scaring people in the woods? Puzzles existed to be solved just like mountains existed to be climbed.

Unclimbed mountains like Cob’s sudden, desperate need to know whether the woman wore a wedding ring or not…

Or, hell
,
maybe a ring doesn’t matter. Maybe I gotta try anyway…

Cob let the razor clatter into the sink and took a step toward the bathroom door. He imagined the conversation if he caught up to her. “Miss, I know this is crazy, but if you’d like to join me on a little adventure…I’d be happy to pay your way, and then you could get two memory erasures at once. What do you say?”

No. Not a good idea. Not after Elizabeth.

Wait. Elizabeth? Who?

Everything slipped sideways and Rupert Cob crumpled to the floor.

Tuesday, January 14, 1947, Los Angeles, California, USA

A scream. Deafening claps of thunder. A flash of lightning—but no, not lightning, because it kept going, and it was too yellow and it was swinging. Swinging and spinning. It was a light bulb, and it wasn’t outside, it was here, in the bathroom, and the bulb was even yellower than a normal bulb because—

Thunk!

Metal into meat. A wet sound, of something being pulled from a sopping pile of rags. That was when the light bulb went yellow, that was when the blood splattered across the wall, the sink, the tiles, the light.

Swinging and spinning, swirling light all around the room…no, not just a room, an apartment. Dirty as hell. Crazy patterns on the walls from the swinging light, light arcing all over the walls making Cob feel like he was on a roller coaster. The screams weren’t from joy or thrilling at the lurch of popcorn-filled stomachs leaping over hills and rushing through tunnels. The screams had been from the thing that arced through the air, glinting and dripping. And it was the one person doing the screaming.

Elizabeth.

The man emerged from the bathroom, a smallish half-bath not unlike this one, and he wore a smile smeared with gore, a dazzled and keen glint in his eye. “I got another bag,” he grunted at Cob. “I got another bag, and I can put you in it, too.” A loud banging came from somewhere, maybe in the hall. Was it the police?

Monday, August 9, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

Cob’s feet scrabbled at the floor, remembering the need to flee back then but feeling unable to, feeling glued to the dusty floor of the empty apartment, gazing into the eyes of Elizabeth’s killer. He’d known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he must push a button and get to the site where he could disappear back to safety, back to something…what? Where? He couldn’t remember. He only knew his palms sweated against the floor, the sawdust gritty and hard beneath his skin.

The hardness was what brought him to something like sanity again. The floor was something solid, something to hold onto, and it was real. The banging in the hall continued. Cob sat up, his breath rapid and catching in his throat, leaving him choking and sputtering. He blinked hard. Tears streamed down his face, and he felt a squeezing, gripping tightness in his chest. The banging still kept on; that was real, that was now, he understood through the terror of the memory.

“Mister Cob? Mister Cob, are you quite all right?”

No. No, I’m not quite all right, because I can remember parts of my last trip. I shouldn’t be able to remember. That wasn’t part of the contract.

BANG BANG BANG.

“Mister Cob! Kris, get the tool kit. Mister Cob, I’m afraid I’m going to have to take the door off if you can’t reply. Sir, are you ill? Did you—oh, thank you. No, it looks like…oh, blast it, how do we get to the hinges with these covers on?”

A feminine voice, farther off, said something too muffled for Cob to understand.

“Okay, yes, sounds good. You know everything, Kris. Bring over that chair.”

Cob struggled to calm his breathing and heart. He swallowed and scrambled to his feet. A glance in the mirror revealed that his face was still only half-shaven. 

“Whoa, hold it still, please. Hand me the screwdriver. No, the flat head.”

At the sound of metal against metal, Cob shook his head hard and squared his shoulders. He shoved aside the image of the long, pale arm resting in a pool of blood.

Focus, man. Act like a person. Pull it together. You’re Rupert fucking Cob, you have a crap ton of money, and you are the bravest bastard you know. Act like it.

Cob knocked on the inside of the door. “Hey, it’s okay, I’m okay!” he called.

On the other side of the door, he heard shuffling and a sliding like heavy furniture being moved. Cob depressed the locking mechanism beside the doorknob and turned it.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, trying to smile at the concerned faces of Mister Jonson and Miss Moto. “I, uh, had something for lunch that…” Cob let his voice trail off and widened his eyes in mock terror and puffed out his cheeks. He made a vague gesture at his abdomen. “Just workin’ through it, if you catch my drift. I’ll just be a sec.” He shut the door again and leaned over the sink. 

Bad lunch indeed
.

The pool of blood once again invaded his memory. His hand trembling, Cob picked up the abandoned razor and finished shaving.

~

“Benoy, should we discuss Mister Cob’s condition upon his last return?”

Ben cupped his head in one hand, his eyes scanning his ledgers. This was always comforting, this examining of the ever-increasing income. Don’t worry about morals, don’t worry about whether various people were alive or dead, just worry about the money.

“No.” Ben kept looking at the ledgers, turning page after page of neatly inked black columns. “Besides, what condition do you mean? Emotional?”

Vere sat across from Ben. “He was in good spirits after the memory erasure. He didn’t bring anything dangerous back with him. He behaved well upon intake today. But that was a close call, if you’ll remember, and he was veritably covered in blood—”

“He wanted to know what happened,” Ben interrupted. “He told us. He just got too…” Ben looked up at Vere. “I don’t know, too
near
. It’s one thing to say you want to know who killed somebody. You can do that a little more sneakily. What Cob did still got him the answers he wanted but, yeah, it was risky.”

“I’m surprised you wanted to take him on again,” Vere said, “given that risk-taking nature of his. And after we had to send a team after Brimley Wheat—”

“We’re not talking about Wheaton,” Ben said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Vere nodded.

It was one thing to imagine it, Ben realized, but it was quite another to have confirmation. “Wait, wait, wait.” Ben lowered his voice and leaned forward. “You
know
he’s dead?”

Vere raised one silver-streaked eyebrow. “That was what we decided upon,” he replied, his voice cold. He rose. “There’s much to do with both Mister Cob and Miss Lessep. I suggest you tear yourself away from your precious bank accounts and join us for the latter’s debriefing.” Vere half turned away. “That is, if you still care about your precious historical knowledge after all.”

Ben bowed his head. “That’s
all
I care about,” he said. “You know me better than to suggest that I don’t—”

But as Ben looked back up, Vere was already gone.