I looked both ways for traffic, saw none, and crossed the street to where he stood. As I approached, I saw two other differences. Like his predecessor, he was wearing a fedora, but it was clean instead of filthy. And as with his predecessor, a colored card was poking up from the hatband like an old-fashioned reporter’s press pass. Only this one wasn’t yellow, or orange, or black.
It was green.
5
“Thank God,” he said. He took one of my hands in both of his and squeezed it. The flesh of his palms was almost as cold as the air. I pulled back from him, but gently. I sensed no danger about him, only that thin and insistent desperation. Although that in itself might be dangerous; it might be as keen as the blade of the knife John Clayton had used on Sadie’s face.
“Who are you?” I asked. “And why do you call me Jimla? Jim LaDue is a long way from here, mister.”
“I don’t know who Jim LaDue is,” the Green Card Man said. “I’ve stayed away from your string as much as—”
He stopped. His face contorted. The sides of his hands rose to his temples and pressed there, as if to hold his brains in. But it was the card stuck in the band of his hat that captured most of my attention. The color wasn’t entirely fixed. For a moment it swirled and swam, reminding me of the screensaver that takes over my computer after it’s been idle for fifteen minutes or so. The green swirled into a pale canary yellow. Then, as he slowly lowered his hands, it returned to green. But maybe not as bright a green as when I’d first noticed it.
“I’ve stayed away from your string as much as possible,” the man in the black overcoat said, “but it hasn’t been
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said, but that wasn’t quite true. I could at least figure out the card this man (and his wet-brain forerunner) carried. They were like the badges worn by people who worked in nuclear power plants. Only instead of measuring radiation, the cards monitored. . what? Sanity? Green, your bag of marbles was full. Yellow, you’d started to lose them. Orange, call for the men in the white coats. And when your card turned black. .
The Green Card Man was watching me carefully. From across the street he’d looked no older than thirty. Over here, he looked closer to forty-five. Only, when you got close enough to look into his eyes, he looked older than the ages and not right in the head.
“Are you some kind of guardian? Do you guard the rabbit-hole?”
He smiled. . or tried to. “That’s what your friend called it.” From his pocket he took a pack of cigarettes. There was no label on them. That was something I’d never seen before, either here in the Land of Ago or in the Land of Ahead.
“Is this the only one?”
He produced a lighter, cupped it to keep the wind from blowing the flame out, then set fire to the end of his cigarette. The smell was sweet, more like marijuana than tobacco. But it wasn’t marijuana. Although he never said, I believe it was something medicinal. Perhaps not so different from my Goody’s Headache Powder.
“There are a few. Think of a glass of ginger ale that’s been left out and forgotten.”
“Okay. .”
“After two or three days, almost all the carbonation is gone, but there are still a few bubbles left. What you call the rabbit-hole isn’t a hole at all. It’s a bubble. As far as guarding. . no. Not really. It would be nice, but there’s very little we could do that wouldn’t make things worse. That’s the trouble with traveling in time, Jimla.”
“My name is Jake.”
“Fine. What we do, Jake, is watch. Sometimes we warn. As Kyle tried to warn your friend the cook.”
So the crazy guy had a name. A perfectly normal one. Kyle, for God’s sake. It made things worse because it made them more real.
“He
The Green Card Man dragged on his cigarette and looked down at the cracked concrete, frowning as if something were written there.
I shook my head.
“Think a minute. How many little explorations and shopping trips did your cook friend make even
I tried to remember how long Al’s Diner had stood in the mill courtyard and couldn’t. “Probably even more than that.”
“And what did he tell you? Each trip was the first time?”
“Yes. A complete reset.”
