Hatch said nothing.
“Martin?”
“Yes, Paul. I’ll keep you notified.”
11
The morning light had shifted. Nick’s untouched coffee cup had stopped steaming. Jack’s never-give-up was half-empty, two fingers still looped through the handle. He had lost an hour flipping through the papers on the table. The stuff he could understand was bills, rejection letters from peer-reviewed journals, and several notes from a psychiatrist requesting Will come back for another appointment.
The stuff he couldn’t decipher was 100 percent William Joyce moon language: calculations, scrawl, articles on Hawking radiation, footnotes on various isotopes, and-alarmingly-correspondence sourcing prices for a ten-thousand-terahertz laser. That had been slashed through with red. Through ’97 and ’98 he had been in contact with second- and third-tier universities around the globe-all of them about to come into possession of a nuclear research power plant. Beneath that stack of correspondence Jack found the fake credentials and airline stubs. Framed on the identity page of a forged U.S. passport, eight years expired, Dr. Howard Gordon Wells stared back at Jack with a distinctly unimpressed expression. Dr. H. G. Wells was a very young William Joyce.
A stupid, on-the-nose flourish like that was something a younger Will would have deemed delicious. Will had been like that, before their parents died. Funny. Excitable.
Lasers. Nuclear reactors. Isotopes. A ticket to Argentina. Fake passports. All that correspondence. H. G. Wells.
H. G. Wells. Jack released his coffee cup, turned in his seat to face the window, and looked at the barn.
The barn was the one place he had not been allowed to enter-the place where Will totally lost it one evening and frightened the life out of Jack and Paul.
The two boys had been maybe ten years old at the time. It had been a cool evening, Jack remembered, and Will had not yet returned home. Jack had made dinner, he and Paul had watched that Team Outland DVD for the thirty-seventh time, and then ran around the house with their action figures and, not for the first time, Paul had asked Jack why they were never allowed in the barn. What did Will do in there?
Jack had told Paul what Will always told him: “Work.”
“What kind of work?”
With that one obvious question the barn had gone from being something matter-of-fact and as impenetrable as a concrete block, as taken for granted as the ground beneath his feet, to a locked door on a big secret.
Anything could be in there.
“Bombs!”
“Superstrength stuff!”
“A spaceship!”
It was a mission for Team Outland. Plotting the movements of imaginary guards, they sneaked downstairs, crossed the gravel path, waited, then leaped from bushes to press themselves against the barn’s rough, red wood.
They quickly discovered Will kept the barn locked tight. Twenty frustrating minutes later Jack was about to call it quits when Paul realized the barn had a dirt floor: they could tunnel under the wall.
Eight minutes later they were in: dirt all over their fronts, grass strands sticking to their hair, action figures in hand.
“Whoa,” Jack said with wonderment.
“Boring,” Paul said with wonderment.
Jack rounded on him, hurt. “Seriously? Look at this stuff!”
The barn’s interior had been crudely redesigned. The farm’s previous owners had run a stable, taking care of horses for private owners who lacked the space to do it themselves. The barn had a broad entrance at either end, the northernmost sealed permanently with neatly arranged nailed planks. All of the stalls had been knocked out, clearing a great deal of space, which was filled with stainless steel equipment the likes of which Jack had never seen. Much of it had power cabling running to it from a padlocked room once used to store feed.
“Looks like a factory,” Paul had said. “What’s that?” He was pointing at the huge, flat, donut-like platform that took up the northern half of the space. A crude iron frame kept the walkway-ring off the dirt. Will had been building a frame around it. An oxy welder was off to the side, next to stacks of irregular steel and iron offcuts.
The centerpiece of the ring was a large cup-cradle of clean and shining metal, empty of whatever it was meant to hold.
Jack had been more interested in the benches and workspaces, all gleaming silver and perforated with neat rows of holes. Bits and pieces of equipment were bolted into the holes, keeping them steady. Black metal brackets secured lenses and cubes of glass. One long black tube pointed down a series of thick monocles.
“I think that’s a laser,” Paul said. “Your brother must have a lot of money.”
“This is why our power keeps cutting out,” Jack realized. “Like, every week, for a whole day. I wake up and nothing works.”
Paul rapped his knuckle against a stack of boxes with a canvas sheet thrown over them: fuses. Hundreds of them. Paul had already moved on, was taking a closer look at a sequence of arcane objects of no identifiable shape and doing a lousy job of attempting to pronounce “interferometer.”
Jack found a pair of dark safety goggles that made him look like the Terminator. Paul took the bait and a firefight erupted. Imaginary bullets bounced off Jack, so Paul grabbed one of the loose lenses, screwed it into his eye (painfully), and declared he was a cyborg. Jack fell on Paul. The lens fell into the dirt and a ’borg-on-’borg grapple-fest kicked off. This eventually segued into an unfair advantage to the Terminator when he resorted to tickling.
Paul got loose, bounded backward with a two-handed blam blam blam…
And then Will had been there, white as a sheet. What he beheld was Jack and Paul frozen mid-combat, like raccoons in a spotlight. Lenses and beam splitters scattered in the dirt, safety goggles hanging off Jack’s left ear. The madness passed, and Jack realized just how much trouble they were in.
Will transformed. Shock transmuted to rage, a rage that made him unrecognizable. Jack had no words. Paul actually screamed. Paralyzed with fear they were easy pickings and within seconds Will had seized both of them by their collars.
Jack’s voice evaporated. Paul whimpered and started to cry.
Will had dragged them bodily to the door, screaming like a demon. Jack said nothing, his shirt cutting into his armpits, sneakers scrabbling in the dirt. Paul kept whimpering, stammering excuses. At the threshold, Will tossed them both out into the night. Jack caught the fall on his bare hands, gravel tearing the skin of his palms. Paul rolled.
A heaving silhouette in the doorway, a nightmare made flesh. With a final animal shout Will slammed the doors, banishing the boys to darkness. Then the thrashing of chains: Will locking the barn, violently, from inside.
Paul was sobbing. Jack’s heart was taking up too much space, stopping his lungs from being able to do their job. Cries came from inside the barn as Will discovered each new disaster.
“I wanna go home,” Paul had said.
“Go. I’ll… I’ll…”
“You’ll be okay?”
As Will discovered some new horror fresh cries reverberated across the yard, echoed back from the treeline.
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Back in the present, Jack stood outside the barn looking in. The doors were cracked open, the dark interior illuminated by morning light spearing through missing shingles and gaps in the planking. Teasing the door open with one hand, he slipped inside.
Empty.
The gear was gone. Every last bolt. The feed room on Jack’s left and the tack room on the right were unlocked. The floor of the room on the left had been dug out and wooden covers fashioned for the six-foot depression. The wooden covers had half circles sawn out of them at the edges, presumably for cabling. Similar gaps were cut in both the interior and exterior walls of the room.