“Yes.” Debby put her hood up.
“Those two guys can’t be,” Frank said, noticing the only two other people in the area.
“Where?”
“There. Over by the museum. All they’re wearing is suits.”
Frank realized that one of them was short, slight, and elderly, with white hair and a matching goatee. Next to him was a tall, well-built young man, with short, dark hair and a square-jawed face.
“My God, it’s them,” he said.
“Who?”
Even at a distance, their eyes were intense.
“Hey!” he called, “Wait. I want to talk to you.”
They turned and walked away.
“Stop!”
They receded into the falling snow.
Frank hurried toward them, leaving the plaza, heading along a quiet street. The snow fell harder.
“Frank!” Debby called.
He looked back. “They went toward the restaurant!”
“Frank!” This time the word came from Alexander where he waited with Brother Richard in front of the restaurant.
Frank stepped toward them and felt his shoes slip on ice under the snow. He arched backward. His skull shattered against a lamppost.
Standing next to Alexander and Brother Richard, Frank watched Debby slump beside his body, sobbing. A siren wailed in the distance. People emerged from the restaurant and approached in shock.
Oddly numb, Frank couldn’t feel the cold or the snow falling on him. “I’m dead?”
“Yes,” the elderly man said.
“No.”
“Yes,” the young man said.
“I don’t want to leave my wife.”
“We understand,” Alexander said. “We had people we didn’t want to leave either.”
Snow fell on Debby, covering her coat as she sobbed next to Frank’s body. Bystanders gathered around her.
“Ice under the snow?” Frank asked. “I died because of a crazy accident?”
“Everything in life is an accident.”
“But you lured me toward it. You distracted me so I’d walk faster than I should have in the snow. I told Debby you were guarding us, but she didn’t believe me.”
“She was right. We’re not your guardians.”
“Then what are you?”
“Your companions. We stopped you from dying when you weren’t supposed to, and we helped you to die when it was your time,” Alexander said.
“We died as you drove past our wrecked car on the highway, going to the opera,” Brother Richard continued. “The rule is, you bond to someone in the vicinity of where you die. Then you help that person die when he or she is supposed to, and you stop it from happening sooner than it’s supposed to. Everything in its time.”
“The opera?”
“You weren’t supposed to be there. The storms, the difficulty of flying home from Los Angeles, they were supposed to make you stay away. When you went to such extreme efforts to come back to Santa Fe and go to the opera, we had to convince you to leave early.”
“You’re saying Debby and I would have been killed in a car accident if we stayed until the opera was finished?”
“Yes. In a crash in the storm. But only you. Your wife would have survived.”
“And at the farmers’ market?”
“You’d have been killed when the truck swerved to avoid the bicyclist.”
“Only me?”
“Yes. Again your wife would have survived.”
“I don’t want to leave her,” Frank said.
“Everybody dies. But in this case, you won’t be leaving her. She was so near you when you died that you’re now her companion.”
Frank slowly absorbed this information. “I can be with her until she dies?”
“Until you make sure that she dies when she’s supposed to,” Brother Richard said. “Eight months from now, she will die falling from a stepladder. Unless you stop her. Because that’s not her time. Six years from now, she will die in a fire. Unless you stop her from going to a particular hotel. Because, again, that’s not her time.”
“When will she die?”
“Twelve years from now. From cancer. That will take its natural course. You won’t need to assist her.”
Frank’s heart felt broken.
“She’ll have remarried by then. She and her new husband will adopt a little boy. Because you love her, you’ll share her happiness. Afterward, she, too, will become someone’s companion.”
“And after we fulfill our duty?” Frank asked.
“We’re allowed to find peace.”
Frank gazed at his sobbing wife as she kneeled beside his body. Blood flowed from his skull, congealing in the cold.
“One day I’ll be allowed to talk to her as you and I are talking?”
“Yes.”
“But in the meantime, she’ll eventually love someone else and adopt a child?”
“Yes.”
“For fifteen years, I was her companion. All I want is for her to be happy. Even if it means not sharing her happiness…”
Frank at last felt something: the sting of tears on his cheeks.
“I’ll be glad to be a different sort of companion to her for the rest of her life.”
I intended “The Companions” as a reverse take on Ray Bradbury’s “The Crowd.” The story is very personal. Everything that occurs in the first part of the story, all the events at the opera, actually happened to my wife and me. It was one of the eeriest evenings of my life, hurrying from L.A. to go to the opera, battling storms, meeting the old and young man (the younger man from Christ in the Desert) at the dinner, then sitting next to them at the opera, and then leaving the opera because of them, only to find that their car was parked next to ours. I began to think that perhaps my wife and I had guardian angels, that we were meant to leave the opera early to escape the storms, that I was in the land of Ray Bradbury.
THE EXCHANGE
Thomas F. Monteleone
Jim Holloway was on fire.
Burning with the inexhaustible fuel of youth, fired by the bellows of imagination. Actor, writer, magician, inventor—his ambitions and his dreams as scattered as the stars in a midnight sky. At the advanced age of fifteen, he’d somehow managed to drag the sense of wonder about the world from his earliest years into adolescence, and he attacked each morning with a need to do something special—that day, and every other to follow. Something new and different before nightfall.
Every day.
The kids in his high school mostly thought he was an odd duck, but he didn’t care. His sun-bright blond hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses gave him a striking, memorable appearance, but it was when he spoke that people tended to pay closer attention. Jim had a… a reverence in his voice when he talked about the world he perceived. His curiosity stretched from the magic life in a drop of water to the mysteries of Mars.
He’d realized that life was an endless quest, full of discovery and adventure, if he would only allow it to be so.
Alone in an unfamiliar city, he walked its avenues in search of the shop of none other than Maestro the Magician. Ads in the back pages of Amazing Stories promised miracles of illusion from an address in Providence, Rhode Island, and from that arcane location, Jim had received “The Secret of the Oriental Rings.” Because of a family trip, he now had the chance of a lifetime—to actually roam the shop’s shadowy aisles, to uncover its treasures firsthand.
Other than a January wind to drive him through the streets, he had no idea where he was going. The cold air cut through him like an assassin’s blade, but he didn’t care. It was 1937 and Jim Holloway was on an adventure!