Ripped - Peter Wallace (fantasy novels to read .TXT) 📗

for Basement.

“Are you, um, married?”

“Yes! Her name is Sylvia. It’ll be forty-two years for us in two months.”

“And children?”

“We had three--two girls and a boy. Ruth is 38, Renee is 34, and Russell is 32. Gosh, Dad, there’s so much I want to tell you. I can’t believe... we--”

The elevator door opened and we all fell silent. The basement was dark, but we simultaneously looked toward the light spilling out of the janitor’s closet to the right and automatically began walking toward it.

Charles arrived first, glancing around inside the room. “Champ? You in here?”

From behind some janitorial supplies the Braves-cap-bedecked head popped out. “Oh, hey, Mr. Frances. Can I help you?”

“Yeah, that dog you were hauling away. Did you put it in the dumpster or what?”

“Why, it’s right over here--I was going to give it a proper burial.” Champ the janitor reached down to untie the twisty-tie which held the trash bag closed.

“We were wondering if there were any tags on it. You know, county dog tags. Did it have a collar on?”

“Well, now, you’d’ve thought I would have already thought to look, see if it had... any... sweet Jesus!”

The three of us gathered closer around the janitor, fumbling with the plastic bag. He looked up at us, helplessly, questioningly. Simultaneously, our jaws dropped as he opened the bag to reveal the contents.

The dog had been reduced to a pile of bones, completely clean and white, several of them broken--apparently where I’d run over the poor mutt. “Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord,” Champ murmured.

“Are you sure that’s the same bag?” I asked, shocked, doubting my eyes.

“Yes sir! I can’t imagine how...”

Charles crouched over the bag and reached in. He carefully rearranged the bones. “They look as though the dog died, well, fifty years ago. They don’t even stink. Ah, here we go.” He pulled out a collar, complete with a shiny metal tag. “Well,” said Charles as he examined it, “this dog was late for his shots.”

He held the collar out for Edwin and me to see. The tag was engraved “Fulton Co., Ga. 1958-59,” along with a number.

The three of us stared into space in three different directions.

“Fifty years. Just like me,” Edwin muttered.

“Okay,” I said, trying to grasp what few straws were available to us, “I hit this dog from nineteen sixty on Dansle Street in twenty ten. Then, a few hours later I go back and find Mr. Frances from nineteen sixty there, right where I’d left the dog. Meanwhile, the dog turns up where Mr. Frances was, fifty years ago. And now this dog, poor thing, he... hmmm. Edwin, are you feeling all right?”

“Why, yes, I feel fine. I certainly don’t feel as though I’ll be reduced to a pile of bones myself anytime soon. But then, who knows?”

“Yep,” I murmured, “who knows?”


Charles, Edwin and I spotted one of those Greek-owned diners that have a million things on the menu across the street from their office building. With a minimum of words between us, we agreed to sit there and nurse some beverages and play with some food while attempting to make whatever sense we could of all this.

As we walked through the front door, a fiftyish waitress hollered, “Hey there! Coffee for y’all?”

I kind of mindlessly nodded, giving her permission to bring her Bunn pot over to the table we seemed mindlessly to settle on.

“So who wants coffee?” she asked again, waving the nearly full pot of black coffee, making me nervous that she would slosh it all over us.

Charles muttered, “Decaf for me, please.” Edwin asked for hot tea. I finally said, “Coffee. Regular.”

She sloshed the coffee into the thick ceramic mug as I grabbed the cream dispenser. In the same movement, she slapped three menus down in front of us. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said with a hoarse, smoky voice. Her hair was bleached blonde, puffily plastered in place. For a moment, I wondered if perhaps we hadn’t all been transported back to nineteen sixty. But no. She was merely an anachronism. And damn proud of it, no doubt.

We all studied the menus as though they were inscrutable legal contracts we were being forced to sign.

“My word,” Edwin muttered, “the prices at this place! They’re outrageous! Two and a half dollars for a cup of tea? That’s absurd. Get that waitress’s attention. I’m going to cancel my--”

Charles interrupted him gently. “Dad, remember this is fifty years later than your time. There’s been a little thing called inflation going on since nineteen sixty. Two fifty is standard fare for a cup of tea. These prices are all normal. Don’t worry about it. I’ll get this. Order whatever you want.”

As father and son compared notes on cuisine, I realized maybe Gregory should be in on this. Maybe his warped mind could help us make some sense of it all.

“Excuse me,” I said absent-mindedly, pulled my cell phone from my pocket and walked outside, punching his speed dial number.

“Hello,” Gregory answered as though he were making an abrupt declarative statement rather than the gentler questioning inflection most people used.

“Gregory. It’s Friend. Listen, I’m downtown at a coffee shop on Peachtree, right across from the ComBank building. I’m here with a couple of other... uh... guys. Can you join us? I could use your brain.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No, I don’t think so. I hope not. Anyway, it’s way too much to explain on the phone. Can you come? Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.”

“Sold. Fifteen minutes.”

“Thanks, man.” I ended the call and walked back to the table. Charles and Edwin were still perusing their menus, but as I returned they both laid them aside and Charles removed his reading glasses and stuffed them into his pocket. They both stared at me as though they expected me to explain what had happened to them.

“Well, I just called my friend, Gregory,” I explained. “I thought maybe it would help to get someone else’s perspective. Someone not involved.”

The father and son nodded, almost in unison.


“So at lunch you didn’t tell me you had hit this dog?” Gregory’s question was really an accusation. His eyes stared hard, unblinking, shaming me.

“No. And I’m sorry. I just couldn’t deal with it. But that’s beside the point now. This is all about much more than just me hitting a dog now.”

Gregory had walked through the door approximately a quarter hour after we talked. I was so glad to see a familiar face again that I hadn’t even noticed the short, chubby, bald man who’d followed him in and walked swiftly to the booth across the aisle and down one from us. I’d stood up to greet Gregory and then introduced him to Charles and Edwin.

“You two must be brothers,” Gregory said nonchalantly to the two other men as he slid into the booth across from me.

“Well, no, actually we’re father and son,” Charles explained in a helpful tone.

“Oh--so you’re the father?” Gregory asked Charles innocently.

“Uh, no. I’m the son.”

Gregory’s blank face revealed his puzzlement. Clearly, Charles was older than Edwin. Or so it appeared. Gregory shook the confusion out of his mind and picked up the menu.

“So, Greg, what do you do for a living?” Edwin asked, attempting to make conversation.

“It’s Gregory. I’m an art director at an advertising agency,” he explained as he perused the menu. We had already placed our orders—sandwiches and salads all around. “Oh, hey, Friend, we got a cool website project this afternoon I may get to design. Lots of HTML5 stuff. That should be fun.”

As he spoke excitedly, I noticed Edwin mouthing the word “website” and “HTML5” silently, as though he were trying to pick up key phrases of an unknown language.

Della (that was the name of our waitress according to the plastic name plate pinned just above her ample breast) returned to take Gregory’s order. After she left, he sat back, stretched his arm out behind Charles, resting it on the back of the booth, and said, “So. What’s up?”

As carefully as I could, I recounted for my friend the events of the day, from hitting the dog on the way to meet him for lunch, to discovering a plastic bag full of dry dog bones in the basement of the ComBank Building. Occasionally, Charles would interject a minor fact or observation. Edwin remained silent. I couldn’t tell if he was listening intently, consumed by his own thoughts, or had simply lost his mind altogether.

While I talked, Gregory would look at me, then turn his gaze to Charles, then to Edwin, then back to me. It was as though he were studying our expressions for any clue regarding the huge hoax we were pulling on him, trying to figure why I would go to all this trouble to enlist two older gentlemen and trick him. But the longer I spoke, the less suspicious he seemed. A couple of times I glanced over at the bald gentleman but he seemed totally zoned out from our conversation, which greatly relieved me.

In the middle of my dissertation, Della brought our salads. Before long, the sandwiches came as well. Finally, Gregory’s open-faced hot roast beef sandwich and fries arrived, just as I was winding up my presentation.

It had taken a full twenty minutes to recount the events as carefully as I could for Gregory. “And that’s where we are now,” I concluded with just the right note of triumph. “Sitting here in the diner. At the present moment.”

That’s when he challenged me about lunch. To him, that was the primary concern--that I had deceived him by my silence. It was a huge sin in his eyes, tearing at the very fabric of trust between friends. And yet, he seemed to accept my apology. Still, I knew I would be paying for this one for weeks to come.

“So now what?” he asked, cutting the corner off his sandwich with his fork, swirling the chunk of bread and meat around in the gravy, and stuffing it into his mouth.

“Well, that’s what I was going to ask you,” I said. “What do you think?”

“Can’t talk. Mouth full,” he mumbled, chewing. The three of us sat and watched him masticate until he swallowed. Our eyes followed the wad slide down his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

I expected him to say something, but he cut off another chunk and repeated the process.

“I think,” he said, finally, still chewing, “maybe we should talk to somebody who knows something about, I don’t know, quantum physics or something. Somebody at Georgia Tech. Or else,” he hesitated as he forked in another mouthful, “someone who knows a lot about science fiction.”

“I’ve been wondering,” Edwin said, clearing his throat, “whether I’m the singular human anachronism. What I mean is, somehow the dog came forward fifty years, and somehow I did too. We not only were brought forward fifty years, but our locations were suddenly shifted, across town. My question is, did anyone else come with me from the past? Or, conversely, was someone from this present time shifted back fifty years, taking my place?”

Simultaneously, Gregory, Charles and I lifted our eyes to peer into the distance, meditating on Edwin’s comments.

“Certainly a possibility,” Charles