The Obsidian Blade (13 page)

“I knew it.” He grabbed Tucker by the shoulders and locked eyes with him. “Tell me where you were,” he said in a tight voice.

“I was . . . I was with you.”

“Where?”

“At the — on the — up on the top of the tower —”

Kosh released him and threw up his arms and looked skyward. “Praise God, I’m not crazy after all. It really happened!” He looked at Tucker. “World Trade Center, right?”

Tucker nodded.

“Nine eleven?”

“Yeah.”

“Man! I thought it was a dream!” Kosh was walking in tight circles, waving his arms and talking fast. “But it was so real, everything! The smoke . . . I was coughing for days. The doctors told me it was the fall. The
fall
? Falling off a barn doesn’t make you smell like burning jet fuel, now, does it? I can’t believe this.”

He slapped Tucker on the back, sending him staggering. Tucker fell onto his hands and let fly a howl of pain.

“What did you do to your hands? Let me have a look. Ouch! C’mon inside. Let’s get you bandaged up, okay?”

Kosh didn’t stop talking the whole time he was cleaning and bandaging Tucker’s palms. “Thought it was bees at first,” he said. “I was just finishing putting up the weather vane and heard this buzzing behind me. I turned around and looked, but I didn’t see anything except maybe a little waviness in the air, like heat rising off a hot highway, you know? Then I felt this weird reverse wind, like instead of blowing against me it was sucking at me. And then —
bam
— I’m on the tower. Thought I was having a psychotic episode. Then I ran into you —’course, I didn’t know you at the time — and I was sure of it. The psychotic episode, I mean.”

“I sent you a ladder.”

“You sure did! I remember you were on my shoulders, and then the second plane hit, and you were gone, and the smoke — so much smoke — and the heat coming up over the edge, and I’m thinking it’s the end.” He paused. “Then I hear this clatter and I see this stepladder lying on the deck, like it’d been there all along.”

“Your ladder. That’s how I tore up my hands.”

Kosh finished wrapping Tucker’s right hand. “How does that feel?”

“Better.”

“Good.” Kosh sat back. “The weird thing is, back in 2001, my stepladder was this rickety old wooden job. I just bought the aluminum one last year. Anyway, I set that ladder up and climbed up it and next thing I knew I was rolling down the barn roof.” He put a finger to his nose. “That’s how I got this nose. Broke my collarbone and a couple ribs, too. Then I made the mistake of telling the docs what happened. Psychotic break brought on by post-traumatic stress, they said. I spent a month in the psych ward, trying to convince them I wasn’t some kind of dangerous lunatic.”

“A month? But I just —”

“This was in 2001, don’t forget. I came back the same time I left.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Me neither.” Kosh closed his eyes, then opened them. “But I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I mean, if it was real — and I’m not so sure it was — I might have had time to save some of those people. I might have used the ladder to break through the doors and get some of them out. But all I could think of was getting off that roof.”

“Anybody would be scared.”

“Didn’t say I was scared.”

“Well,
I
was. Anyway, you didn’t have time to save anybody.”

“Maybe not.”

“I’m just glad we got off.”

Kosh put his hands on Tucker’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Look, I don’t know what happened, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you. I owe you one. I got a bad feeling about that . . . whatever it is.”

“Maybe it’s a time portal. Or a wormhole,” Tucker said, lifting the terms from a movie he had seen.

“Call it what you want. I want nothing to do with it.”

“I mean, we both went through, and the ladder went through, and we both ended up at the same time and place. But when we went through it backward, it took us to where we each started from.” Tucker took a breath. A thought had been slowly solidifying in his brain. Maybe the thing he’d seen on the roof back in Hopewell was another time portal. Maybe that was what happened to his dad the day he had disappeared. . . .

“H
OW ARE YOU GOING TO GET UP THERE IF YOU HAVE TO
fix the roof or something?” Tucker asked.

“Let it leak,” Kosh said.

Tucker backed away from the barn to where he could see the peak. The satellite dish was there, but the disk, wormhole — whatever — was not visible.

“It’s not there,” he said.

“It’s been gone before. I’m taking no chances,” Kosh said. He looked up at his handiwork. The bottom fifteen rungs were gone. “Guess I don’t have to take them all off.” He climbed down and collected the rungs, hanging them over his forearm as he picked them up.

Tucker said, “Shouldn’t we tell somebody about it?”

“Tell who?”

“NASA? The FBI? The Highway Department?”

“The Highway Department?”

“Well . . . it’s transportation, right?”

Kosh shook his head. “Believe me, we do not want to get the government involved in this.”

“But maybe they could figure out a way to save the towers. Go back in time with an antiaircraft gun and shoot the planes down.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“Why not?”

Kosh ticked off points on his thick fingers: “First, it’s a done deal. The towers collapsed, and that’s that. You go back and change that — even if you
could
change it, which I don’t think you can — then everything from then on would be different. You’d be a completely different person. And second, if you were a different person, then none of this would’ve happened in the first place.” He raised his nonexistent eyebrows, daring Tucker to prove him wrong.

“So we just do nothing?”

“What we do is, we stay off that roof.” Kosh looked at the rungs hanging on his arm. He walked over to the rusting pile of scrap metal by the corner of the barn and dumped them on top of a bunch of empty beer cans. “As far as I’m concerned, it never happened.”

“What never happened?”

Kosh jerked his thumb toward the roof.

Tucker was confused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we forget about it. Get on with our lives.”

“But —”

“No
but
s. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a mental institution or chained to a wall in a CIA dungeon, and I
especially
do not want to spend the rest of my life dead.”

“But —”

“But nothing. I been in a straitjacket once, and that’s one time too many. Case closed.” He crossed his arms and regarded Tucker. “How are your hands?”

“They’re okay.”

“Good. Anybody asks you what happened, say you fell off your bike.”

The next day, over a breakfast of pancakes and bacon, Tucker tried again to talk to Kosh about the tower, but Kosh said, “That’s ancient history, kid.”

“Ancient history? It was yesterday!”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kosh said.

“You’re worse than my dad,” Tucker said. “He used to say that all the time.”

“Maybe he had his reasons.”

Frustrated, Tucker finished his breakfast and went outside. He looked up at the roof. No disk. Maybe it was gone for good. And maybe Kosh could pretend it had never happened, but Tucker knew better — the disk had been real. Furthermore, he was sure there had been another one in Hopewell, on the roof of his house. The one that had caused his father to disappear. But disappear to where? Not the World Trade Center. And he had not returned through the disk but had come walking up the road with Lahlia. That might mean there was yet
another
disk — and that Lahlia had come from some place that was certainly not Bulgaria. Some place with pyramids and priests and a “blood moon,” she had said that day at the swing.

He thought about the misty people he had seen floating above the barn, and in Hopewell. Ghosts? Angels? They had not looked very angelic. No wings, or halos, or radiating goodness. His mom believed in angels, but she said she had been seeing “ghosts.”

He didn’t know
what
they were. Lahlia had called them Klaatu. Tucker was becoming convinced that the disks, Lahlia, and the ghosts were all connected. And maybe his parents’ disappearance, too.

He had to return to Hopewell.

Back inside, Tucker followed sounds of hammering to the third floor, where he found Kosh balanced precariously on a sawhorse, installing a strip of bead board in the ceiling.

“How’s it going?” Tucker asked.

Kosh turned his head to look at Tucker, lost his balance, and slipped. His hammer fell to the floor, and he landed with one foot on either side of the sawhorse and let out a string of curses.

“Good thing that sawhorse isn’t six inches taller,” said Tucker.

Kosh looked down at the two inches of space between his crotch and the bar of the sawhorse and cursed some more.

“And I can’t find my damn stepladder,” he said. Tucker opened his mouth to explain, thinking that the missing ladder would surely prove to Kosh that they had really been to the World Trade Center, but what he saw in his uncle’s face stopped him cold.

Tucker’s big, fearsome, seemingly invulnerable uncle was afraid.

“I guess I got to drive into town and buy a new one,” Kosh said.

“There’s a ladder in the garage at home,” Tucker said. “Why don’t we go get it?”

“Drive two hours for a ladder? No way.”

“We could check on the house, make sure everything’s okay.”

Kosh was not convinced.

Tucker said, “Tell you what: I’ll drive.”

“You? You won’t be street legal for another two years. If we go — and I’m not saying we’re
going,
because we
aren’t
— I’m driving. You clear?”

“Okay,” Tucker said.

Kosh picked up his hammer and climbed back onto the sawhorse.

“My dad has an electric nail gun,” Tucker said. “I bet it would make that job go a lot faster.”

“I don’t need a nail gun,” said Kosh, and promptly smashed his thumb with the hammer.

E
XCEPT FOR THE TALL GRASS AND HALF A DOZEN SOGGY
copies of the
Hopewell Shopper
on the front steps, the house was much as they had left it. Kosh immediately raided the garage for tools. Tucker examined the roof. He walked around the house to view it from different angles. He saw no sign of the disk. After a few minutes, he went through the house to search for any signs that his parents had been there. He found a dead mouse in the toilet, spiderwebs in every corner, and thousands of box-elder bugs. Other than that, everything was as he had left it.

He gathered some odds and ends — books, a handheld video game that needed a battery, a few articles of clothing — loaded them into a cardboard box, and carried them outside.

Kosh was standing beside the car, talking to a girl with blond hair. The girl turned toward Tucker.

“Hello, Tucker Feye,” said Lahlia.

Her hair was longer and was coming in darker yellow, more the color of corn than of corn silk. The summer sun had tinted her face a pale bronze, making her eyelashes look almost white. She was dressed in loose jeans and a black T-shirt with a pink skull and crossbones printed on the front. Above the skull were the words
Eat Vegan or Die.
He noticed that she filled out her T-shirt more than he remembered, and she seemed taller.

“Nice shirt,” he said, staring at her chest.

“Arnold and Maria find it disturbing.”

“I guess that makes sense, them being dairy farmers and all.”

“They are ignorant, but not unkind. Primitive people believe that by eating animal flesh they can take on the qualities of the creature they are consuming. Fortunately, Maria no longer tries to put dead animal parts into my food.”

“Animal parts?” That sounded disgusting. He imagined Maria Becker hiding a chicken gizzard inside a brownie. “Like what?”

“She would add broth made from dead roosters to my soup, and fried chips of smoked hog flesh to my salad.”

Kosh, who had been listening with an amused smile, laughed. “Chicken stock and bacon never sounded so bad,” he said. He headed back to the garage for more tools. A small gray cat appeared from beneath the lilac bushes, trotted over to Lahlia, and rubbed its cheek on her ankle. She bent over and picked it up.