OceanofPDF.com

THE HERMIT NEXT DOOR

KEVIN HEARNE

SUBTERRANEAN PRESS 2024

OceanofPDF.com

The Hermit Next Door Copyright © 2024 by Kevin Hearne. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration Copyright © 2024 by Dominic Harman. All rights reserved.

Interior design Copyright © 2024 by Desert Isle Design, LLC. All rights reserved.

Edited by Jonathan Strahan

Ebook Edition

ISBN

978-1-64524-196-6

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

subterraneanpress.com

OceanofPDF.com

BENNY used to say that the mysteries of the universe are hidden in the sounds of water. Not in the sight of it, or its taste, or touch, and definitely not its smell. The chuckle of creeks, the roar of waterfalls, the hiss of tides, the patter of rain: he said they were all whispering secrets to us that we couldn’t decipher. And like him, I used to listen to water and be content that I couldn’t translate its language into anything meaningful. But now that Benny is gone, I listen to water and wonder if perhaps it’s trying to explain why good things don’t last.

* * *

TENNESSEE WAS FULL of too many memories after Benny’s accident, smothering us with the past and preventing us from seeing a future. Every eye we met drooped in pity, lips and tongues undulated in the same pattern to express sorrow for our loss, and our refrigerator filled with sympathy casseroles until I wanted to toss a grenade in there and detonate them all. We never ate a bite of that food baked in consolation at four hundred degrees.

No. I sold the house, looked at the unexpectedly large life insurance settlement, and bought a swank rural property in Oregon on the Willamette River, over the objections of our son, Pax.

“Mom, if we have to move—and I get it, I’m on board with the general idea—then let’s at least move to a city where there’s something to do. And somewhere closer. We can live anywhere, so let’s live somewhere good.”

I didn’t want anywhere closer because anything that sounded like home would summon Benny’s memory to my head immediately. “You can live wherever you want in a few years, starting with college,” I told him. “But I still want riverfront property.”

“Some rivers run through cities,” he pointed out. “We don’t have to disappear into a small town.”

“You just want access to gigabit Wi-Fi.”

“No, I also want access to gigabit Wi-Fi. I’ve got a whole list of reasons to live in a bustling metropolis. I can draw up a list of river cities in the South and print you a hardcopy since you’re old.”

“I’m not that old, Pax. It’s not like I have a fax machine.”

His eyebrows drew together in confusion. “What’s a fax machine?”

Dear Lord in Heaven. What if I am that old?

* * *

IN MY DEFENSE, the new place I settled on wasn’t that far from a city. Butteville nestled between Salem and Portland, far enough away from the Interstate that the nights were quiet and all you could hear was insects, and the sky remained full of stars instead of haze. Portland was just a half hour away by car if we wanted big city attractions like…baristas. Handsome hipster baristas with thick-rimmed eyeglasses and glistening oiled beards and flannel shirts, and they all read feminist lit in the gym. Lord, my fantasy life was getting rich already.

For me, the attractions of any given “metropolis,” as Pax might say, never outweighed the drawbacks of traffic and fumes. Professionally, I needed quiet—or quiet plus the sounds of nature. I had an online yoga business to run, regardless of how fast my Wi-Fi was. Advertisers paid me because I offered peace and quiet in my videos, maybe even birdsong that didn’t come from a pigeon or a crow, and an escape from cubicles and fumes and city noises. Suburbs weren’t as quiet as realtors would like you to believe: somebody’s dog was always barking, or a kid was screaming, or a lawnmower fired up at unconscionable hours. For real peace and quiet you needed few neighbors and plenty of space between them.

At least one of our new neighbors had much the same idea, because there was a thick cedar hedge between our property and theirs, and trees shielded much of their house from the street. I’d seen enough horror flicks to ask the realtor about it before I made an offer.

“Hey Ronnie, what’s with the house that screams ‘Don’t look at me, folks, no murders going on here’?”

“Oh! That’s Mr. Fisher’s place.” Ronnie Selkirk spoke with a voice cured to a husky growl from twenty years of smoking a pack a day. She tried to mask the funk of her clothing and hair with perfume, and while I appreciated that effort, she was a lot to handle on the aroma front. Still, I liked her because she was trying her best. “He won’t bother you, hon. He’s something of a famous recluse around these parts.”

“Famous or infamous?”

She chuckled breezily and toyed with a sparkling earring. “Definitely famous. He gives generously to local charities and the police and so on, and in return he just wants to be left alone, so everyone respects that. He gets everything delivered—you can’t see it, but there’s a little shed for deliveries behind those trees, and he leaves cash tips in there for the delivery folks. No one’s seen him in years, but we know he’s okay because he keeps ordering supplies. Man doesn’t even own a car.”

“How does he get the cash?”

“The bank brings it out to him.”

I blinked. “Banks do that?”

“He gets very large sums on direct deposit, so they’re willing to run an envelope out every so often for his needs.”

I frowned. “What does he do?”

Ronnie shrugged, an expansive gesture since her bright red pantsuit included significant shoulder pads. “He invented some things years ago and lives off the proceeds from the patents. Something to do with power generation, I think—see those solar panels on the roof?”

“Yeah?”

“Those are custom jobs he made himself. Word is he generates plenty of excess that he sells back to the power company. I imagine he’s still inventing things, but nobody knows for sure. Point is, he won’t bother you, Mrs. Chisholm, and we haven’t had a bunch of people go missing around here either, so he’s not busy with murders in the basement. He’s as quiet as can be.”

But what if he had a friend? “Does he have a dog?” I asked. “And you can call me Winnie Mae, Ronnie.”

“No, he doesn’t have any pets, and neither does your other neighbor. I made sure beforehand like you requested, Winnie Mae.”

“And who’s the other neighbor?”

“A retired couple that’s hardly ever there. This is a summer home of theirs.”

“They don’t rent it out, do they?” Renters might throw loud parties.

“No, they spend the fall and winter down in Arizona and come back up here when it gets hot. They have a landscape company doing their yardwork, and so does Mr. Fisher. Same company, comes at the same time each week, does one property and then the other, so that’s a bit of scheduled noise to work around.”

“Scheduled noise I can handle. It’s the unexpected noise when I’m doing a session that can ruin my day. What happened to the people who lived here?”

Ronnie shook her head sadly. “Previous owner was an old man named Jasper Henshaw. Cancer got him. It’ll get me too, I expect.”

“Oh? Lot of cancer deaths around here?”

“No more than the usual. I mean, there’s nothing especially toxic driving the rates up. But cancer gets one out of three people eventually.”

“So this Jasper Henshaw didn’t leave his house to his kids?”

“Oh no, he did. They’re the ones putting it up for sale. One lives in Colorado and the other in North Carolina.”

I grunted at that and begged her indulgence while I explored. I spent forty-five minutes prowling the outside of the property, circling the house and inspecting flowerbeds before heading back to the river and listening to what it had to say. It said nothing, because there were no rapids, no rocks breaking the surface, and no wind causing ripples. It was slow-moving and the surface was smooth and reflective as glass.

But something about it was enchanting—a gestalt of subtle cues adding up to an almost otherworldly energy. It felt like sanctuary.

My walkthrough of the house took only fifteen minutes. The kitchen and bathrooms needed a remodel, and the carpet had to go on general principle because nothing gets my gander like other people’s dander. I’d be filtering the water until I could get the tap tested. The finished basement was nice, especially the study with built-in bookshelves. But the location was one thing you couldn’t fix with a contractor, so that was what mattered most. And from all appearances, the property seemed to be perfect. All I heard was birdsong—no airplanes overhead, no loud trucks in this tiny gated neighborhood with about ten houses in it. I could film yoga sessions in multiple spots around the backyard, even on the back deck and the private dock on the river, and one of the small bedrooms would serve nicely on days when the weather didn’t cooperate.

But most importantly, the water didn’t try to whisper any mysteries of the universe to me.

* * *

HAULING OUR BUTTS and collective stuff into Butteville was largely conducted in a sullen if twitchy silence, both of us swilling donut shop coffee as I drove a rented van. Pax was generally angry—about his father’s death, about moving to a small town with no one his age nearby, about the prospect of being the new kid at school where he didn’t sound like everyone else. The angry stage of grief might be one he occupied for some time, and layered on top of that was some fresh anger at me for moving him so far away from his friends and everything familiar in his life. I saw fights in his future, because sure as the sun rose in the east, someone would tease him about his Tennessee accent and he’d snap rather than shrug it off. Not that he was prone to fighting; he simply didn’t know what to do with his fury yet and he’d likely take advantage of the first outlet offered. And while Benny and I had taught him to be patient and kind with people, Benny had added that Pax was not to take any shit from bullies. Since he was a fairly tall and well-built kid who played baseball, that had never been an issue before, but I worried that he’d be eager now to listen to Benny’s advice in lieu of patience.

When we turned off I-5 and were in the final approach to Butteville, he started to pay attention to the surroundings. I am fairly certain this was called “checking the vibe,” but if I uttered that phrase he would shut me down and say my generation wasn’t allowed to say that. We saw green-netted fields with poles in them for vines of the Cascade hops prized by craft brewers, and rows of bushes sprouting marionberries that would show up first in farmers’ markets and later in pies and preserves. And there were plenty of orchards with bare ground underneath them, no secondary crops or ground cover at all.

“I’m pretty sure those are hazelnuts,” I said, gesturing out the window as we passed.

“They don’t call them hazelnuts around here,” Pax told me.

“Oh yeah? What do they call them?”

“Filberts.”

“Ew. I’m not sure that’s an improvement. How do you know this?”

“The Internet. When it’s harvest time, they fly helicopters over the orchards to shake the filberts loose and then they just hoover them up off the ground.”

I glanced at him and saw that he was trying to contain a grin with only partial success, and that was unusual enough that I knew he was leaving something unsaid.

“What? Oh, I know what’s going on. You’re being polite but thinking of a much different way to say it.”

“Yes, ma’am. I was raised to be polite.”

“Go on, then. Have your fun and try to shock me.”

“Harvest time is nut-sucking time. They suck those nuts for days.”

“Mmm. Are they salty?”

Pax gasped. “Mom!”

I laughed at him as he sank into his seat, shuddering and pulling his Volunteers ballcap over his eyes, one of the orange creamsicle kind with a white capital T in the middle of it.

“You have just, like, ruined a whole category of food for me.”

I was fairly certain he would never speak of hazelnuts or filberts to me again.

* * *

SOMETIMES I HATE being right. Pax got in a fight before noon on the first day of school and was promptly suspended. I did not appreciate the tone the principal took with me when I arrived at the school to discuss the incident. Damon Southard was a bald, bespectacled man with a nasal speaking voice and an abysmal taste in haberdashery—though, if I wished to be charitable, I supposed his ugly tie could have been a gift from a child who despised him.

“Mrs. Chisholm, I’m concerned that our school might not be the right fit for Pax.”

“Oh, that’s good to hear. So you’ll be doing something about your unwelcoming culture.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.”

“That’s disappointing. Because Pax has never been in a fight before. He was obviously provoked and you’re focusing on his self-defense instead of paying attention to the fact that you have bullies here.”

“The reports I’ve heard all claim he was the attacker.”

“Reports from your gang of bullies, no doubt. What is more likely, Mr. Southard: a kid with a spotless record arrives in a new environment desperate to make friends, and decides the best way to do that is attack someone on his first day, or the new kid is bullied and belittled by the locals for his accent and demeanor?”

“Regardless of what is more likely, the violence is unacceptable.”

“I hear you saying that, Mr. Southard, but I want to hear you say the bullying is unacceptable too.”

“Of course it is.”

“So I hope you’ll be communicating that to their parents who might be laboring under the misapprehension that their brats bear no responsibility for what happened. To paraphrase a popular idiom, they effed around and found out. And if they don’t want to find out any more, their kids should leave mine alone. Let us say that boundaries have been established.”

Mr. Southard sighed in defeat. I did feel some sympathy for him; I doubted that very much of his job was pleasant. I couldn’t imagine that any of it was pleasant, honestly. But I’d successfully steered him away from the suggestion he’d been trying to make, that I should withdraw my son from his school based on a single bad day. “Here is a boundary, Mrs. Chisholm: If Pax fights again, he’ll be expelled,” he said, his tone flat.

“Understood. Thank you, sir. Pax was an excellent student in Tennessee, and he will excel here too, if given the chance.”

Winning a minor skirmish with Mr. Southard did not fill me with confidence, because I knew there was a bigger battle ahead. Pax had been waiting in the office anteroom, and he followed me out of the school in silence because we did not settle family matters in public.

Once in the truck, I examined his face. Split lip. The beginnings of a shiner on his left cheek. His dark hair tousled, square jaw clenched.

“Tell me you gave as good as you got.”

He looked down at his lap. “Better, ma’am.”

“Will I be paying any bills?”

“Some dentistry, I expect.”

“That’s fine. Now tell me what possessed you to start a fight.”

“No disrespect, ma’am, but I believe I finished it.”

“You’re expected to finish them, but you are not expected to gloat. Did you swing first?”

A pause. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Why?”

“They were mocking my accent, calling me a racist redneck.”

“Pax! Did you say something racist?”

“No! They just assumed I was because I’m from Tennessee.” He turned his ballcap around. I should look into getting him a local ballcap. Not the Beavers, though. Maybe the Ducks.

“So that was it? They just called you a redneck and that was your cue to open a can of whupass?”

“No. They started with the inbred jokes, and even when they said my mom was probably my sister, I held back.”

“Okay.” I waited for the literal punch line.

“Then this one kid said I probably wanted to marry my twelve-year-old cousin. Not that I have one. Got all in my face, kind of sneering, or…what’s the word that rhymes with it?”

“Leering?”

“Yeah. So ugly and nasty. That he would even think that was just evil. So him, I punched.”

I gripped the steering wheel, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. It was difficult not to utter a word of approval there, but I crafted a more measured response. “We can hope he will learn from the experience and be better from now on. And we are going to make certain that you are better from now on. Aren’t we?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You’ll be expelled if you get in another fight. And they’ll know that. They might try to provoke you again, so you have to be ready.”

Pax kept his head lowered and shook his head. “I hate it here.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

“Back to Tennessee?”

I scowled as I turned the key in the ignition. “No. Home.”

“I didn’t mean I hate it here, specifically—well, I do—I meant Oregon in general. I’m judged as soon as I say anything. We could’ve moved to Georgia or Kentucky or the Carolinas if you wanted out of the Knoxville area. Shoot, Chattanooga has a river and fiber optic internet that’s owned by the city. And they have all them vintage houses you like.”

I didn’t answer until we were out of the parking lot and driving home. “I’m sorry you hate it here, Pax. We can work on your accent if you want. But we’re not going back. If I am surrounded by that accent then all I’ll think about will be your father and then I’ll be sad all of the time instead of just most of the time, you know? I have to keep it together at least a little bit, and the distance allows me to do that.”

“So that’s what we’re doing? Running as far away as we can?”

“That’s what I’m doing, yes. Not fair to you, I know, and I’m not sure it’s the best coping strategy I could have picked, but it’s better than buying boxed wine and drinking myself to oblivion, which sounded quite attractive to me at one point. I really needed this change. Still do. But I want to make it work for you as well.”

“I don’t see how you can. I’m not only every Southern stereotype in their minds now, I’m violent too.”

“Yes, you have dug yourself a deep hole. But I think you’ll find someone willing to reach down and pull you out. Some of these West Coast girls are going to love that accent, if you hang onto it. And when you find out who the baseball coach is and he gets a load of your throwing arm, you’ll have a team behind you.”

“Unless that guy or his friends are on the team.”

“Oh.” I winced. “That could be an issue, yeah.”

He sank into his seat and repeated, “I hate it here.”

“Okay. It looks like you need to sulk a little bit.”

“I don’t need to sulk,” he said sulkily.

“Right. When we get home, go sulk by the river. You haven’t even been back there yet, have you?”

“No.”

“It’s why I bought the place. There’s something magical going on back there.”

He scoffed. “Are you gonna tell me it’ll realign my chakras or something?”

“No. It feels like a refuge from the world somehow. A safe harbor.” He was checking out, thinking I was spewing wellness language at him, the sort of thing I peppered into my yoga videos, so I gave up trying to convince him and deployed the direct plea. “Just try it, please, instead of retreating to your room?”

He agreed to try it, but warned me that it had better be awesome.

“It will be,” I assured him, though I wasn’t so sure. The demands of moving in had kept me from spending any time out there myself, and I hoped I hadn’t been imagining whatever subconscious goodness suffused the air.

* * *

AFTER A COUPLE of hours, when I was thinking maybe I should go check on him, Pax returned from his sulk utterly transformed. He was cheerful and had his hat turned back around to face forward again.

“Mom, I’m sorry. I was wrong. This is in fact the best place in the world to live. Thank you for moving us here.”

“What? Are you being serious?”

“Totally. I can’t believe how lucky I am.” He was beaming at me without a trace of guile.

“This is, uh… I don’t know how to respond. This is quite the turnaround here. What caused you to change your mind?”

“I met our neighbor, and I am pretty sure he is the coolest person on the planet.”

“The guy that the realtor said nobody has seen in years?”

“Yes. Mr. Fisher.”

“You saw him just now?”

“Yeah. We’re going to hang out tomorrow.”

“Well, hold on now. Protective mother instincts have to be soothed here, because if no one’s seen him and he immediately shows up when we arrive, that’s weird. I want to meet him first.”

Pax’s eyes widened in panic. “Oh, no. You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t like people.”

“Well, you’re people, Pax. So if he suddenly likes you I have to wonder why and worry about his motives. And I would be irresponsible if I let my son hang out with a stranger I’ve never met. So I’m going to have to insist.”

“No, Mom. He’s a hermit for a reason.”

“It’s a bit weird to call him a hermit when he lives in a gated community. But what would that reason be?”

“He’s really, just…different.”

“Different? Different is a word that people use in interviews about that neighbor boy who grew up to be a mass murderer.”

Pax rolled his eyes. “He’s not that kind of different. He’s, you know⁠—”

“No, I don’t know. That’s why I need to see him.”

“That’s the thing. He doesn’t want to be seen. Because he looks different. People stare.”

“Did you stare?”

“Oh yes, I very much did.” He executed an exaggerated nod. “I totally understand why he hides.”

“Is he butt ugly?”

“Not in the least. He’s just…”

“Different, I get it. Fine. Describe him to me.”

Pax took a breath, started and stopped a couple of times, and then slumped his shoulders. “You wouldn’t believe me. You’d take me to get tested for drugs.”

“Are you on drugs?”

“No!”

“Do you think I’m on drugs? Because I’d have to be to let you hang out with someone I’ve never seen or spoken to.”

“I can’t believe you’re hung up on this. I should have just lied and said I’m going to hang out with someone from school and you’d be happy that I’m making friends.”

“No, you should not have lied. And I wouldn’t have believed you anyway since you weren’t in school long enough to make friends. You were in a fight before lunch. Look. I’m not opposed—yet—to you hanging out with him. That’s a judgment call I have yet to make, and I can’t make it unless I meet him. I’m not trying to be a killjoy here. I’m trying to be a responsible parent concerned for her son’s welfare.”

“Okay, I appreciate that, but…how about a phone call?”

“We will exchange phone numbers when I meet him in person, sure.”

“Fine. I’ll tell him. But just, you know⁠—”

I raised a challenging eyebrow at him when he stopped, realizing he had better choose his words carefully.

“Try not to freak out, okay? He doesn’t deserve to be treated even worse than the assholes at school treated me.”

“Whatever disability he has, I’m sure I can handle it.”

“He’s not disabled or disfigured in any way.”

I threw up my hands in surrender. “I will keep an open mind. But the meeting happens before the hangout.”

With a mighty sigh, Pax pulled out his phone and fired off a text. Zhwoop!

“I let him know.” Zwhoop! “Oh. That was fast. He says we can come over after dinner.”

“Very sociable for a hermit.”

“Yeah, well. We kind of expected you to insist on this.”

“You two are already in cahoots?”

“Maybe? I’ve never been very clear on what a cahoot is.”

* * *

WELCOME COOKIES FROM a new neighbor are not as sure a thing as sympathy casseroles from old neighbors when you lose someone, but they serve the same social purpose: they are an offering of calories to be deployed in a time of uncertainty. The uncertainty, in the case of new neighbors, is whether you’re going to be “their kind” of people, and whether they should file you under “nice folks” or “those damn transplants.” Which meant if you peeked under the welcome, you would quickly realize that what the neighbor actually brought are fact-finding cookies, and you’re not welcomed so much as pinged with a kind of social sonar.

So when the doorbell rang and a smiling white woman stood on our porch, her spray-tanned arms cradling a stoneware platter of baked goods, I smiled back, because I was being judged and wanted to be found friendly.

As soon as she said, “Hiiiiii,” in a syrupy sweet voice, I could hear Pax behind me scrambling to disappear. He wanted no part of whatever that was, because he knew it wasn’t the technician assigned to install our Wi-Fi.

Dressed in a sleeveless white dress that showed off toned shoulders and hugged her hips, ending at the knee, bleached teeth flashed briefly before she closed up and presented one of those polite, ingratiating smirks. She had dark hair with some streaky blond highlights in an A-line bob, parted on the right. She was in her mid-thirties and I was guessing she’d have a kid or three at home, and statistically speaking at least one of them would have special dietary needs, owing to a peanut allergy or a gluten intolerance or veganism. If I confessed to any of those she wouldn’t bat an eye—she’d have backup brownies in her kitchen already made.

I was nowhere near so put together, of course. I had on some teal leggings and a black sports bra and my hair was simply pulled back in a ponytail, because that was pretty much how I lived my life. I had no plans to open the box with my dresses in it for months, if ever.

“Hello,” I said, and waited for her to proceed. The teeth flashed at me again.

“I’m your neighbor, Sarah Bainbridge, just across the way. I just wanted to welcome you to our little street in Butteville, and I baked you some brownies and cookies and things.” It occurred to me briefly that in choosing a place to live I should have considered all of the neighbors a bit more carefully, not just the ones on either side. This little street might possess a disappointing sameness to it, and we would come to pine for the diversity we’d enjoyed in Knoxville, but I’d prioritized “quiet riverfront” above all else, and as a result may have landed us in an enclave of privilege. But it was both too early and too late for such regrets; I’d have to revisit them when I wasn’t the subject of a neighborhood scouting mission.

“Oh, how thoughtful of you! Thank you, Sarah. I’m Winnie Mae. Would you like to come in?”

“Sure!”

I moved aside and swept my arm in a beckoning gesture. It was time to begin the ritual exchange of apologies and compliments.

“Sorry the place isn’t put together yet, we’re not even half unpacked. Let’s go to the kitchen.”

“Oh, not to worry, I understand, I’m sorry for dropping by at an inconvenient time.”

Sarah said she loved my leggings and my cute sneakers. I said I loved her haircut and needed to know the name of her stylist. That gave her the opportunity to offer up her extensive knowledge of the area. Most of the fun, apparently, was to be had on the southern outskirts of Portland. After fetching her a water, I tried a cookie and made yummy noises, even though it wasn’t very good. She didn’t bake with lard—I’d have to get used to that.

“Do you have any kids?” she asked. A more pertinent question to ask, perhaps, than if I had a husband. Because I didn’t have a ring on my finger anymore, though the impression of it was still there. She was sharp enough to spot that, at least. By contrast, one didn’t have to be sharp at all to spot the giant rock on her hand.

“One. His name is Pax.”

“Pax? I love it. I have two, Hunter and Taylor. Hunter’s twelve and Taylor’s ten. Poor thing can’t eat gluten, so I have gluten-free stuff if you need it.”

“Oh, no, we’re good with the regular, no need for unleaded. Pax is fifteen, and probably in hiding at the moment. The dubious joy of having a teenager will be yours soon.”

“He’s not in school?”

“He’ll get there,” I assured her. “We want to get settled in here.” Since her kids weren’t in high school, they might not hear he got suspended for fighting on his first day, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.

“Of course. You know, I’ve never been in this house.” Her eyes drifted up, looking perhaps for cracks in the ceiling or other signs of the house settling. “I mean, we knew Jasper well enough to say hello, but he kept to himself somewhat. But not as much as your neighbor. Never laid eyes on him.”

“Mr. Fisher? The realtor said he was kind of a famous hermit.”

“For sure. I don’t think anyone’s ever actually seen him, apart from Jasper. You know, he used to wheel out Mr. Fisher’s garbage for him. I don’t think he ever came out of that house.”

I cocked my head at her. “Never?”

Sarah crossed her arms defensively as if I’d questioned her integrity. “Well, if he did, I never saw it in all the years we’ve lived here. Maybe you’ll get lucky and meet him.”

It was probably not the right time to mention that I’d be visiting him later, so I simply said, “I hope so. It would be weird to never meet your neighbor. Speaking of which, I’m so glad you stopped by. Once we get everything settled, we’ll have to have you over for dinner.”

Her arms dropped and her smile broke like the dawn. “Aw, we’d love that! And since we are settled, we’d love to have you over in the meantime. Might you and Pax be free this weekend?”

“Oh, yes. That’s so kind, thank you.”

We chatted a bit more, arranged dinner, and she left before it got awkward and never asked my relationship status, which earned her some points in my book even though I knew she was absolutely the neighborhood snoop and needed to know everything. She must have figured it was just Pax and me since I hadn’t asked if I could bring a plus one to dinner, but I was grateful to not have to say it out loud: I am a widow, and though I might not be hiding in my house for years like Mr. Fisher, I have never felt so alone in my life.

* * *

PAX HELPED ME with unpacking for a while and sighed in resignation about the news we’d be dining with the Bainbridges that weekend. After dinner—boxed mac & cheese, a culinary crime—Pax led me in the dark to the small dock we had at the river, carrying a flashlight. I had no plans to get a boat, but maybe a canoe wouldn’t be out of the question at some point. Crickets chirped, frogs croaked, and the stars winked, reflecting off the surface of the river.

“Why are we going this way?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we be knocking on his front door?”

“No, that would let people in the neighborhood know he receives visitors. This is his real door, anyway.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked as we stepped onto the dock.

“This,” Pax said, a few steps ahead of me. He flicked on the flashlight, bent over, inserted a few fingers into a gap between the boards, and there was a clicking noise and then a whirr. A portion of the dock slid away, like a panel, revealing a small intercom with a button and what looked like a tube sliding down into darkness rather than a short drop into the river.

“What in the world, Pax?”

“One sec, Mom.” He knelt and thumbed the intercom button. “Mr. Fisher? We’re ready to visit if you’re available.”

A pause, and then a man’s cultured voice with an English accent replied: “I am ready. Please proceed, and welcome.”

“Procced?” I asked. “Where? Down there?”

“It’s a slide, Mom. It’s fun. And safe. Safe as can be. You said you wanted to meet him. This is how you do it.” He flashed a grin at me and jumped down the slide, letting rip with an ironic “Yee-haw!” as he went, and leaving me in the dark in the process.

“Pax!” I called, much too late. It wasn’t like he was going to crawl back up the slide. But I hesitated to follow, because…this was weird, right? We had gone to all that trouble to invent staircases and doors and build them into our houses. Out loud, I muttered, “Why would someone build a slide that leads from their neighbor’s dock to their…secret underground lair?”

A bunch of other questions popped into my head, like whether Ronnie Selkirk knew about this hidden access to the neighboring property. And if we weren’t supposed to be seen entering the front of Mr. Fisher’s house, presumably we couldn’t be seen leaving it either, so how were we supposed to get back? What if this was a trap?

Whether it was or not, my son was down there, so I had to go after him.

The slide might have been fun if I wasn’t worried about what waited for me at the bottom. It could be a ball pit, an industrial meat grinder, or a tank of piranhas. Not sure why those showed up in my head as the top three possibilities. I needed to get a new therapist and unpack that.

The slide seemed long. Longer than it should reasonably be. Like, amusement park length, not playground length. The bottom turned out to be slightly scooped up at the end, delivering me to a soft landing on a pair of incredibly plush queen-sized mattresses, stacked on top of each other. Pax was standing next to the landing pad, smiling.

“Good times, eh?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I replied, rolling over and planting my feet on the ground. “That remains to be seen. Why the hell does this even exist?”

“For very good reasons,” Pax assured me. “Which you’ll learn soon.”

“Where’s Mr. Fisher?”

“He’s in the next room. Just wait here with me, and remember you promised not to freak out when you see him.”

“Did I promise that?”

“Promise me now.”

“Okay, I promise. I’ll be cool. Chill. Whatever the current word is.”

As I took in my surroundings, I was uncertain whether I’d be able to remain chill. The ceiling was low—mere inches above our heads rather than a comfortable few feet. The air felt fresh, however, if a bit humid. I spotted some vents and heard a low hum of machinery indicating that a pump was running. The room was lined with shelving up to my waist, nothing higher, but there wasn’t a single book to be found on them. They were filled, instead, with curios from various cultures, each labeled as if they were museum pieces, and one shelf contained nothing but shallow, velvet-lined boxes of polished rocks, sorted by type. Above the shelves, on the walls, were paintings of landscapes featuring rivers.

“We are so lucky. He is so awesome.” Pax was practically vibrating with excitement. “Okay, Mr. Fisher. We’re ready,” he called.

I heard a squeak from the other room, followed by the same cultured English gentleman’s voice. “Excellent,” it said. I expected to see a dignified, jowly older man in either a business suit or a smoking jacket, or perhaps a curmudgeonly sort with thinning hair, but struggling with a profound vitamin D deficiency either way. What entered the room instead was a gray trench coat, blue paisley scarf, and a creepy doll’s mask in terra cotta, sculpted to look like one of those little babies flying around in the corners of Renaissance paintings. There were no visible feet at the bottom of the coat, which dragged on the floor, nor any hands emerging from the sleeves, which flopped and dangled bonelessly. What’s more, he was only about four feet tall and appeared to have no real shoulders. If the trench coat wasn’t tightly cinched around his middle, it would fall off him. His neck was long and thick, but utterly swathed in fabric. I couldn’t see an inch of skin.

“Uh, Mr. Fisher? Thanks for agreeing to meet.”

A series of squeaks and chirps happened again, but it wasn’t from some friction of a tennis shoe on a wooden floor; it sounded like it came from behind the mask. And then a round medallion sitting on top of the scarf pulsed with blue light—I hadn’t seen it before because it had blended in with the paisley—and the English gentleman’s voice projected from that. “Mrs. Chisholm, thank you for coming, and for keeping an open mind.”

“An open mind? Why do I need—what’s going on? Why are you wearing a mask?”

The squeaks and trills and other high-pitched noises definitely came from behind the mask, followed closely by the reply. “I’ll remove it soon. You’ve probably already noticed that I have difficulty speaking English in my own voice, and this device translates for me. And you’ve no doubt noticed many other strange things about me, all of which have perfectly reasonable explanations, but may come as a fairly sizable shock. I want to minimize those shocks and emphasize, while you are still calm, that I am harmless and wish you nothing but health and happiness and indeed, hope that we will become the best of friends.”

“While I am still calm?” I could practically feel my heart speed up at the suggestion that I wouldn’t be calm for much longer.

“Yes. Experience has taught me that once I remove my mask, everyone—including Pax, I’m sure he’ll confess—loses their shit. And I hope you will forgive me for using such a crude phrase, but the idiom is surprisingly accurate. One person did in fact suffer an involuntary loosening of their bowels, and if you do, not to worry, it’s entirely understandable and we can get you cleaned up in a hurry.”

I turned to Pax. “Did you…?”

“No, Mom, gross! I mean, yeah, I was shocked at first because I don’t think anyone can help being surprised, but look, I’m totally fine now, right? You’re going to have a ton of questions and that’s cool. Just be patient and everything will be answered. The key thing to remember is that we are safe and in no danger at all.”

“The fact that you’re saying that makes me feel like we’re in danger.”

“We’re not. I swear we’re not. The last thing Mr. Fisher wants is to hurt us. Right?”

The doll face mask nodded. “Quite right. In fact, it would be counterproductive as I was rather hoping I could convince you to help me with some small matters that require human intervention.”

“Human? You said human.” I chuckled nervously. “Are you not human, Mr. Fisher?”

Pax said, “Might as well show her.” Then to me he said, “Remember, Mom, you promised.”

At that point one would have expected a hand to emerge from one of the sleeves, a bend at the elbow, and a smooth removal of the mask. What happened instead was that the head drooped down, the chest bulged outward like an alien baby was struggling to win free of the ribcage, and this nub pushed awkwardly at the chin of the mask until it toppled off. Once Mr. Fisher’s true visage rose to meet my gaze and I saw the toothy mouth that had been making those squeaks, I broke my promise to Pax and freaked out. I was able to identify a high-pitched noise as my own scream before everything went black.

* * *

“MOM? MOM!” PAX’S face swam in my vision as my eyelids fluttered open. I was on my back, staring up at a featureless ceiling of gray stone. Whatever I was lying on was soft.

“What happened?”

“You fainted. But you’re okay and totally safe.”

“I fainted? Why?”

A few urgent squeaks reached my ears an instant before an Englishman’s voice said, “It might have had something to do with me,” and Mr. Fisher abruptly loomed overhead, his face next to Pax’s, and I screamed again.

* * *

WHEN I WOKE next, Pax looked very concerned. “Mom. You’re okay. You’ve fainted twice and hopefully that’s out of your system now. There’s no reason to be afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Of Mr. Fisher. He’s left the room so you can get yourself together.”

Memory returned. “Mr. Fisher! He’s⁠—”

“I know. And it’s fine. We are safe. Just take a second to absorb that. Switch off your lizard brain.”

“Lizard brain?”

My son grinned at my outrage. “I thought that might punch through the panic. He just wants to talk. He’ll stay on the other side of the room if you like. Okay?”

I pushed myself up to a sitting position and reoriented myself. I was on the mattress at the bottom of the slide. The shelves and paintings stretched before me, and opposite was an arched doorway that was really a portal since it lacked an actual door. Mr. Fisher was out of sight.

“How do we get out of here?”

“No, Mom, let’s talk first.”

“We can talk after I know where the exit is. That will help me calm down.”

“Okay. There are two exits to our property. First way is the slide.” He reached over and pressed a button mounted on the wall next to the slide. The interior lit up and ridges emerged from the bottom, just a couple of inches, but enough to give a toehold. “That turns into a ladder and you climb back up to our dock. That’s what I did the first time. But there’s another exit he told me about that I want to try.” He pointed through the portal. “We go through there and take a left, which would have us heading toward the front of Mr. Fisher’s property. Then we take another left, which would lead us underneath our property. There’s a ladder there—impossible for Mr. Fisher to climb—that leads to a secret chamber behind those built-in bookcases in our basement.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. Mr. Fisher was friends with the man who owned our house before.”

That corroborated what Sarah had said; Jasper Henshaw had rolled out his garbage to the curb for him, which I now understood to be completely necessary.

“Are you ready to have a conversation now?” he asked.

I nodded and Pax called Mr. Fisher to come back. He appeared after a moment, still in the trench coat and scarf, but without the mask. My breathing quickened and I tensed up, but this time there was no involuntary loss of consciousness.

“Stop there,” I said as he entered the room, and he did. “Are you an alien?”

“No. Come now,” he said through his translator device. “You’ve seen something like me before.”

“Not that fucking big, though. They don’t grow that big here. Or talk. Or own real estate.”

“Two out of three are true. This Earth did have creatures my size at one point, but they died out long ago. What I mean is that I am from this planet—just a different version of it. One where evolution took a different direction and my ancestors became the dominant species rather than yours. I’m not an alien, therefore, but a neighbor from an alternate timeline.”

“He’s from a parallel universe, Mom.”

“Parallel?” I pointed at Mr. Fisher, whose name I now realized must be a joke. “That is not parallel.”

Mr. Fisher’s head was covered in rich brown fur except for a light tan on the lower jaw and neck, and his whiskers splayed out horizontally from his muzzle and twitched, now free of the mask. He would be in many respects adorable, except that his teeth looked incredibly sharp and able to tear out a throat, especially since he appeared to be an otter three or four times the size of any otter I’d ever seen.

“A divergent universe, certainly. But parallel in many physical respects. This river you call the Willamette, for example, exists in both places, and your river has many points of overlap with mine. It’s how I came to be here.”

“What?”

Pax jumped in. “Remember when you said the river was magical, Mom, like a safe harbor? That was really close to the truth.”

Mr. Fisher nodded. “On my world the river is also slow and silent at this particular spot. Almost identical in terms of its flow and contours, and that similarity is what allowed me to access your world.”

“Access it how?”

“Through the use of a quantum displacement matrix named after an otter you’ve never heard of.”

“…I have no words.”

“I can be patient. You require more data. So I will observe that your species’ obsession with spaceflight appears wasteful to us. Our exploration efforts have always leaned toward parallel universes rather than exploring the void, because once you take a look at the distances involved, space exploration makes little sense. If you’re searching for life, you need a planet with water on it, and we have one right here. Many, many versions of the same planet. All linked by water—or more specifically, rivers.”

“How do you mean, linked?”

“The short version is that the quantum matrix looks for similar instances of water flow and bank conditions in a prescribed stretch of river. Years of erosion and weather patterns may yield very few similarities or hundreds, depending on where you are. And of course the river’s flow and contours are shaped differently if there are a series of dams—which you have. It so happens that this stretch of riverfront property is strikingly similar on over three hundred different versions of the planet. And we thought these versions would all be very close to ours because for these conditions to exist, there would need to be an extensive system of dams on this river. We foolishly assumed that the presence of dams meant the presence of our society, and therefore compatible conditions. So I arrived here expecting an instance of the planet similar to mine, but what I got was a planet where my species had gone extinct long ago.”

“And on your version of the planet, humans are…?”

“Nonexistent, as my people are here. I don’t know if you evolved and died out or simply never evolved. We do have smaller simians like yours, but no great apes. This may be because on my world, the meteor that landed in the Gulf of Mexico here and wiped out the dinosaurs hit the land instead, and while it was catastrophic, it wasn’t the end of most life on the planet. More like a third.”

“Which means you still have dinosaurs?”

“Very much so. They’re thriving in the oceans, which doesn’t really concern us, but on land they’re largely confined to the continents which equate to your Africa and Australia, as well as islands like Japan and the Philippines, Indonesia and so on. We have spread to dominate what you call North and South America, as well as Europe and Asia.”

“So your people are a species of giant otters that are exploring alternate universes for…what purpose?”

“Technology and pharmaceutical advances, even political ideas. You have an abundance of all three, but your technology and political ideas are incompatible with ours. Pharmaceutically, however, you’re an astounding find, because you’ve had millions of years of alternate evolution here. There are plant species here that we don’t have at all, not to mention yourselves and many other animals. Well done on the chickens, by the way. They’re delicious. Taste like velociraptor.”

“Thanks?” I said. “But the realtor said you’ve been here for years. A famous hermit.”

“Yes. Because I’ve been a bit stuck. Explorers like me—quantum rangers—are sent out knowing we might never make it home. We are supposed to build our own quantum displacement matrix when we arrive, which should be possible if we arrive on a planet filled with people like us using the same materials science—which we were hoping for, again, because the presence of dams on the river implied our species might be here. It’s turned out to be much more difficult for me since human technology has developed in completely different ways.”

“How so?”

“We don’t use fossil fuels, for one thing. Which means we don’t have plastics or petrochemicals and we also don’t have a climate crisis or polluted waterways.”

“Oh. That sounds lovely. What are you using for power?”

“A number of sources. We’ve achieved fusion—you have just made your first steps—but along the way we developed solar, wind, and hydro, of course, all operating at higher efficiencies than yours, and before fusion we used thorium molten salt reactors to fill in any deficits.”

“A reactor? You mean nuclear?”

“Yes. But safe. No chance of meltdowns and a tiny fraction of the radioactive waste produced in your plutonium. We never approached nuclear power generation as a stepping stone to weapons, so it made a tremendous difference in the direction of our efforts. Thorium is much more plentiful and not as dangerous as uranium.”

Pax asked, “What do you use for materials then, if not plastics?”

“The same ones you do, with some minor differences—because it’s the same planet, after all. We rely on ceramics, glass, fibers, and metals.”

“You have mines?”

Mr. Fisher made a chittering noise that wasn’t translated, which meant it was probably laughter. “We not only have mines, our cities are almost entirely underground.”

I blinked at that because I didn’t think of otters as a subterranean species. “Why?”

“Because we are carnivorous predators. Our food supply is dependent on abundant prey—prey that requires pristine waterways and unspoiled habitat to thrive. The only structures we have above ground are dams, energy production and transmission, a few large fiber farms, and high-speed monorail.”

“No aviation?”

“None. Poking your head above the trees is a good way to get eaten by a pterosaur.”

“Lord have mercy. That would be a terrible way to go.”

“Agreed.”

“So…you were hoping we could help you with some small matters?”

“Correct. I do need help to make it home, and to survive here. As you may have already guessed, the former owner of your house was helping me.”

“Jasper Henshaw?”

“Yes. He was sitting outside on his dock the night I arrived in your river, drinking a beer and smoking a small roll of plant life—a hobby he pursued until his death. Our meeting was a bit fraught at first—it was he who suffered the lost shit—but it was incredibly good fortune that I didn’t meet one of the more violent members of your species. Once we were able to communicate properly—that took some time—we came to a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“Which was?”

“I made him rich and he kept me hidden for decades. He used the money from a couple of my ‘inventions’ to set up his children in style wherever they wished to be, which turned out to be fairly far away, and then he bought this property from the previous owner so that I could have a space of my own. The house itself, built for humans, is practically useless to me and I rarely enter it. These subterranean levels are where I actually live and work. Jasper would often take deliveries of smaller items for me—or things for which a signature was required—and deliver them down the slide. I use the lifts for everything else.”

“Lifts?”

“There’s one in the front—it’s a delivery shed and the entire interior is a lift—and another in the back. Would you like a tour?”

“Perhaps in a moment. I still want you to explain what kind of help you need, precisely.”

“Oh. First, I would like you to keep what is most likely the biggest secret on the planet. I’ve been here long enough to know that I’d be almost certainly be detained and suffer horribly at the hands of your government, should they find out about me.”

“You’re not wrong. You’d have no rights. But why did you approach us?”

“I had very little choice. I had thought Jasper’s children would take his place, but there must have been a strained relationship that he didn’t share with me, as they immediately put the house up for sale. Since I cannot leave here without human aid, I had to gamble on you.”

“Not the other neighbors?”

“Mr. Henshaw said they were unsuitable. Which is the single politest word he used. The others I believe you would find naughty.”

“Naughty?” I said. Pax sniggered and Mr. Fisher understood that he may have said something amusing.

“My translator may not always choose the right word.”

“That was fine. What aid do you need?”

“The quantum displacement matrix to send me home is nearly complete after twenty years. I’ve built the battery I need for the power requirements and charged it. I’ve also fabricated the components and they’re ready to assemble. That assembly is what I need help with. We have to do it in a single night, while no one is watching or traveling the river. I can’t do it alone.”

“And if we help you, then what?”

“I go home. And leave you everything.”

“You mean your house, complete with this…” I gestured to the room helplessly. “Whatever this is?”

“Yes. And my not inconsiderable wealth, which I definitely cannot take with me. You appear to have relaxed somewhat, Mrs. Chisholm. Would you mind terribly if I removed this coat? My arms have been trapped in it for hours and standing on my hind legs for such long periods is tiresome.”

“You mean…get naked?”

“We don’t normally wear clothes. I only agreed to wear them because Pax thought it would reduce the chances of you…becoming a freak?”

“Freaking out,” my son said.

When I shot a glare at Pax he shrugged ruefully. “Sorry. I may have miscalculated. Is it okay if I…?”

“Yes, go ahead. You got him dressed like that?”

“Yeah. He can’t even put on the coat. His arms don’t splay out to the sides like ours.”

Mr. Fisher remained still as Pax walked over to him, knelt, and undid the knot of the trench coat. Once he loosened it, it pretty much fell off him, and then it was a simple matter to unwind the scarf and Mr. Fisher was able to drop on all fours, unadorned except for the translation device about his neck.

“Much better,” he said. I noticed that his front paws didn’t look like normal otter paws.

I tried to be cool about this but felt my heart racing again. Free of constraints, it was easy to see that he was a powerfully built creature and if he wished to attack, there was little hope of fending him off. It probably had been a good idea to dress him at first. “Is that…? Do you have opposable thumbs?”

“Yes. Becoming tool users allowed us to dominate most of our planet’s land. That and language, of course.”

“Have other species in your world evolved language?”

“Yes. But not the thumbs. Which means they have tooth and claw, but no other weapons. Unless they ambush us, we win.”

“You use weapons?”

Mr. Fisher folded up the trench coat and scarf and placed them on the top of a shelf while he answered. “Yes. Not the kind you’re used to seeing, however. I brought piezoelectric flechettes that disrupt nervous systems. Similar to your stun guns, except it can work on creatures as large as a tyrannosaur.”

“I see. And if other creatures on your world have language, would that device around your neck allow you to talk to…whatever?”

“Given enough time, yes. It has to analyze and absorb a language before it can translate. Ready for that tour now?”

I looked to my right. The toeholds turning the slide into a ladder were still there. Mr. Fisher had been nothing but polite. And logic said he really did need our help to survive in this world, so we shouldn’t be in any danger. My lizard brain, however, screamed that he was a predator and we were in his lair, while also screaming that none of this was real and I was dreaming or suffering a major hallucinatory episode. Regardless, I should be setting everything on fire and running away.

Except I was curious. Was that my—what? My cat brain? My cat brain wanted to see more, so long as the lizard brain wasn’t in charge.

“All right. Let’s see what you’ve done with the place.”

* * *

I’M NOT AN expert on the domestic habits of mustelids, but I thought otters made small dens near riverbanks. Mr. Fisher had a six-story complex under his house, much of it filled with unfamiliar items and strange furniture, but also an impressive amount of human landscape art. Turns out that’s what he liked most about us: our paintings. Especially those by the artists in the Hudson River School. He’d invested heavily in them.

Thirty-six rooms—six per level—and his living quarters were on the level immediately below the basement. Many of the rooms, we discovered, were either fabrication shops or storage. Since Earth didn’t have tools made for him, he had to make his own. Or rather, he had Jasper use human tools to craft some tools suitable for his hands, and he proceeded from there.

“You don’t call yourselves otters, I presume.”

“No. But at this point, if I say the word, my device just translates it as ‘otter’ to you. It just did. So we must come at it a different way. Are you familiar with the ancient Roman Emperor Nero?”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“Our name rhymes with his. Replace the n with a k, double the e and r, and roll the r. That is the closest you can come.”

“Keerro?”

“Yes. I mean, that was abominable—but probably the best you can do with your vocal cords. We use the same word for singular, plural, and the name of our language.”

“I see. And is your name really Mr. Fisher?”

“It’s a convenient abbreviation. I am Cunning Fisher, Second Son of the Family Who Has Lived at the Eastern Bank of the Rockslide Riverbend for a Hundred and Eighteen Floods.”

“Mercy. Do you greet each other that way?”

“Only when first introduced. We then append whatever small name we prefer to be called. In your case, I prefer Mr. Fisher. Do you have a preference for what I should call you?”

“Mrs. Chisholm is fine.” He led us through room after room filled with tools and workbenches and pieces of fabricated metal and fired ceramics. None of it looked like recognizable human machinery or parts, and one room housed nothing but a giant battery he claimed that he’d been charging off his solar panels for quite some time. It would power the quantum displacement matrix for his return. Pax followed along silently—apparently he’d been given the same tour earlier.

“You built this all yourself?” I asked.

“With Jasper’s help, yes. He was an excellent craftsman. We couldn’t hire a contractor because none of this conforms to local building codes. And, of course, it would risk revealing my presence here.”

“What happens if you’re discovered?”

“That depends on who does the finding and how well-armed they are. There is little hope of my returning home once human authorities get involved. Secrecy is vital.”

“Does that mean…you’ve made someone disappear?”

“No. It just means I have contingency plans.”

Presumably that meant he had plans if we didn’t cooperate. I didn’t want to ask what they were, because it was best that he not dwell on applying his contingencies to us.

There were a few rooms he didn’t show us that he dismissed as “storage”—doors that might conceal any number of horrors. Bodies on hooks. Jars full of teeth. Veal cutlets. I really needed to find a new therapist.

“So how long are you planning to remain here?” I asked as he showed us seven large ovoid containers that would carry him and assorted cargo back to his world. They were big enough that I could curl up inside of them, but they were the color of Pepto Bismol, which ironically disturbed my digestion a little bit. I hoped there was a symbolic or practical reason to paint them like that and not simply because he liked the color.

“A mere matter of days, if you’re willing to help me.”

“Days? That’s it?”

“I had nearly completed my work on the compilers when Jasper fell ill, and finished it during his decline. All that remains is to put my affairs in order—for your benefit, not mine—load up these capsules, and assemble the matrix. If we began now, I could leave tonight. But it would be more convenient to leave matters open to a return.”

“A return?”

“Yes. Once my people understand the wealth of your world, they might wish to secure some of it before it’s gone.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Mr. Fisher paused his tour and regarded me warily. “By my calculations, you have less than a hundred years before catastrophic ecological collapse.”

“What? Hey, for serious?” Pax said.

“You don’t need to take my word for it. Many of your own scientists are saying the same thing. Your sea levels are rising. Your insects and birds are dying off. You’ll soon have no pollinators, and therefore no food.”

“Is there nothing we can do?” I asked.

“There is plenty you can do, but very little you will do. Half of your species cannot agree on basic facts.”

“What, then? What can we do?”

“You could use any of the cheap, clean energy designs I provided you. If they hadn’t been bought by petroleum companies, that is, and shelved to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry. It did not occur to me when I sold them that they might never be used—I did not understand capitalism or your capacity for greed at the time. And still don’t, if I’m being truthful. The majority of humans are blithely living through the Anthropocene Extinction right now and won’t notice until it comes for them personally. For my part, I can’t wait to get home and breathe clean air again.”

The tour resumed, somber and cold and damp. It had been pointed out to me before that we may have been born at the “find out” stage of human history rather than the “fuck around” era—Pax even more so than me—but somehow it hit harder coming from Mr. Fisher.

“So if Pax comes over to spend time with you tomorrow, what is it you wish him to do?”

“Help me load the cargo pods, and I’ll walk him through how the displacement matrix works so that he’ll understand the principles of constructing it.”

“All right. I’ll allow it, under the condition that he calls me every hour at the top of the hour.”

“Mom, are you for real right now?”

“Set an alarm and make it happen. If that goes well, we can gradually relax that requirement.”

Mr. Fisher was vastly pleased by this and very grateful. He asked if we needed any art for our new home, because he had an impressive collection now and could only take a few samples with him. I said “sure,” and he gave me an original Thomas Cole that would easily fetch a half million at auction. “I’ll place it in the back lift and you can pick it up tomorrow.”

He led us back down to the gallery room where we’d landed on the mattress, but didn’t enter. Instead he turned right, eventually leading us to a narrow hallway that branched off to the left.

“This hallway is lit by motion-activated lights. Just start walking and you’ll see. The ladder at the end is underneath your house and will place you in a small room behind the bookshelves in your basement.”

My manners asserted themselves. I thanked him for having us and being patient with me, then thanked him again for trusting us. I felt a little dizzy walking away as the promised lights came on and I saw the ladder. I turned around to make sure he was still there, and not a hallucination. He saw this and stood on his hind legs in order to make a human gesture with his little otter hand, waving goodbye. It was incredibly cute and terrifying at the same time.

“This is all real? We’re sure about that?” I said in low tones to Pax.

“It’s absolutely real, Mom.”

“What if we were kidnapped by our neighbor and he injected us with hallucinogens and this is just the first stage of an elaborate brainwashing sequence?”

“Jesus, Mom. What if you just constructed conspiracy theories out of nothing like a caller on a talk radio show?”

“Right, right. Okay, you go first. I want you safe.”

“I am safe. And so are you. What is with this paranoia?”

“It’s just parenting. If you ever become a parent, you’ll understand.”

With a final wave at Mr. Fisher, we climbed the ladder, which ascended through a sort of insulated silo until we reached a trap door. We emerged into a room about twelve feet square—again with motion-activated lighting—that contained shelves of journals and knickknacks and various other treasures of Jasper Henshaw that his children obviously never found.

Chief among them were more paintings by artists of the Hudson River School that Mr. Fisher must have gifted him, all framed but resting on the floor, leaning against one wall. A cheap bookcase that probably required an Allen wrench to assemble held rare whiskies and bourbons and a small chest filled with skunky weed. Rolling papers and a gold-plated Zippo lighter were neatly arranged next to it.

“Whoa,” Pax said. “That’s a 4-20 party waiting to happen.”

“Don’t even think about it,” I said, pointing a stern finger at him. “That’s all mine by right of salvage.”

Opposite the bookcase was a mahogany writing desk with an assortment of fountain pens, small bottles of ink, and a small record player hooked up to speakers. A crate of vinyl records waited to be browsed underneath the desk, and the turntable currently had Paradise Theater by Styx on it. Centered on the desk, a leatherbound journal like the ones on the shelves had a yellow sticky note placed on top of it.

“Mom, look at this,” Pax said, pointing. The sticky note said to my successor.

“Ah, a little light reading,” I said, picking it up. “Okay, how do we get out of here? I’m saturated with weirdness and ready to get back to something that looks normal.”

“Really? I’d rather stay here. Normal is boring.”

“You can have another big dose of weird tomorrow. Right now I think it’s weird that there’s no obvious door.”

“But there’s an obvious button on the wall,” Pax said, pointing to a gold button surrounded by a brass plate with a sun motif. He pressed it, producing a click and a small crack in the wall opposite the trapdoor, plus a handle that slid out horizontally from some sort of tray mechanism.

“Okay, that is some remarkable craftmanship,” I said, hauling on the handle. It required some muscle, as this was a significant bookcase mounted on hidden hinges.

Pax stepped through into the basement, the set of his shoulders already indicating that he might be considering another sulk.

After I followed, I saw that there was an identical horizontal pull protruding from the edge of a shelf, and used that to pull the secret door closed. As soon as the lock clicked and engaged, the handle began to retract.

“Oh!” I exclaimed, removing my fingers just in time. The handle disappeared into the shelf edge and I couldn’t see where it had gone—there was no indication that it was there at all. “Holy crap. You can’t tell there’s a door here now. No wonder the children never found that room.”

Pax was looking at the bookcase with me, a frown on his face. “How do we get in from this side?”

“I don’t know.”

“But there has to be a way, right? He wouldn’t fix it so that he always has to go through Mr. Fisher’s place and climb a ladder to get to his stash.”

We searched for buttons, toggles, or anything else that might serve to unlock the door we knew was there but could no longer see. Nothing.

“I guess we’ll have to ask Mr. Fisher about it,” Pax said. “That’s an amazing hidden room, though, really emphasizing the hidden part.”

“For sure. Jasper Henshaw might have smoked a lot of weed and drank a lot of booze,” I said, “but he knew how to keep a secret.”

“Yeah,” Pax agreed. “And now we have to be good at it too.”

* * *

HOT COCOA IS magic. It’s warm, soothing, liquid happiness. After the revelation of meeting our neighbor, Pax and I both could use some. I stirred up some cocoa powder, sugar, and milk on the stove and topped our mugs with whipped cream. Our living room wasn’t ready to lounge in yet, but we had stools at the kitchen island, so we sat there and I opened the journal I’d taken from Jasper Henshaw’s writing desk.

“Shall we see what this says?” I said, glancing at Pax.

“Heck yeah.”

Dear Christine, Candace, or whoever else finds this: Welcome to the biggest secret in the world. I wish I could have kept it to myself, but cancer doesn’t care about my wishes.

For two decades I have gone to great lengths to keep Mr. Fisher safe from humanity. I am convinced, now more than ever, that his only hope of safety lies in secrecy. He tells me that his version of Earth (which he calls Watercourse) is a vibrant and verdant place, teeming with life. I had hoped to get to see it myself, as we were so close to completing his quantum displacement matrix, and what did I have to lose? But chaos and entropy being what they are, that will not be my fate. Perhaps you can restore order by getting Mr. Fisher home, and then using the genius he leaves behind to help save our planet.

Beware the neighbors—none are to be trusted even the tiniest bit. They are all curious and will report Mr. Fisher to “the authorities” in a second if given the chance. But be especially careful of Sarah Bainbridge across the street. She has persistently tried to find out more about him or catch a glimpse. She knocks on his door with baked goods and then leaves them there, which I had to dispose of. She has, on a couple of occasions, followed a delivery into his shed and waited there, trying to catch Mr. Fisher coming to pick it up. It’s monitored, of course, so he knew she was there and sent me over to kick her out the first time. The second time, we called the police and had her cited for trespassing. That stopped her for a while, but she occasionally calls for “wellness checks” on Mr. Fisher in order to get the police to enter his home. It hasn’t worked so far. You may rely on her to renew her attempts now that I’m out of the picture.

You’ll be required to take out his garbage and sign for refrigerated shipments of seafood for him and occasionally other items that require a signature. Everything else will go into the shed. Once Sarah realizes you’ve met him, she will doubtless ask about him. Say that he’s an old man and give no further specifics about his age, appearance, or interior of his home.

To get into the secret room in the basement from the house, press the hidden button underneath the balustrade at the bottom of the stairs.

“Aha! Victory!” I said.

What followed was a bewildering list of bank accounts, usernames and passwords, patents, offsite storage units, and safe deposit boxes full of this and that. There was also a general apology for being a terrible father, an admission that explained why the daughters had rushed to unload the property.

Looking at the inventory of assets, it occurred to me that it would be a full-time job just keeping track of everything. But since the first account listed was one designated for our personal use—we just had to go to the bank with an enclosed letter and ID to have it transferred to our name—I could go ahead and take care of Mr. Fisher full time. There was enough in there that I wouldn’t need to do another yoga session. Ever. But there was a caution that we shouldn’t spend on large-ticket items; that would draw unwanted attention.

“Can you believe this?” I said. “I’m still waiting to wake up. It doesn’t seem real.”

“It is, though. Those numbers don’t lie,” Pax pointed out. “And Mr. Fisher is definitely not a tiny dude in an otter suit. He’s the truth. I’ll tell you what else is true: Jasper’s daughters—I’m assuming that’s Christine and Candace—done made a huge mistake.”

“Huh. Maybe. There’s a lot we don’t know. If Jasper told no one about Mr. Fisher, I bet that made him secretive and snippy. Which means he might not have been the kindest father, which he pretty much confesses here. And there’s no mention of their mother, so she must have passed. The realtor told me his daughters live in different states. I bet you they’re feeling relieved to be rid of the place, and we should respect that.”

I knew that I was relieved to be out of Tennessee. And this Mr. Fisher situation was just the sort of distraction I needed to help me forget.

* * *

I TEND NOT to invest much faith or hope in luck, fortune, or karma, because that’s wasting energy on matters beyond my control. I’d prefer to work and meditate because these are activities entirely in my control. But you can’t be in the yoga business without running into the idea that what goes around comes around, or that positive energy you put out comes back to you, and so on—the corollary being that those who are negative will be punished somehow. I’ve never bought into it because a quick look at one’s own surroundings will prove that if there’s any kind of universal system of karmic ledgers, they’re not balanced very well. I know there are genuinely beautiful people out there whose life is an endless buffet of shit. And anyone can look at billionaires and politicians and know that they are not being rewarded for their decency or positive vibes. If there are systems of rewards and punishments at play, they are man-made ones. Those systems are not fair, and they do not repay kindness.

But being the third person (after Pax and the late Jasper Henshaw) on a planet of eight billion to meet a visitor from an alternate Earth did make me wonder: Was this good luck or bad? We lost Benny to an accident and lost much of the joy in our lives as a result. Was Mr. Fisher, with his gadgets and wonders and wealth, supposed to balance out those losses somehow? Or were we at that never-ending buffet of shit, and Mr. Fisher was more of the same, just frosted so we couldn’t tell at first?

After confirming that the bank account was absolutely real and we abruptly had more money than we would ever need, I toyed with filming a farewell video and retiring. But then I concluded that it would be best to maintain appearances. A key part of keeping secrets sometimes is to act as if you don’t have any to protect. And I was going to do yoga anyway for myself, so I might as well continue my career.

Pax was faithful about calling every hour while at Mr. Fisher’s, and when he came home he was so happy and full of energy it almost made me cry. He asked if he could go back again, and I said he could if he called every ninety minutes.

The next day I signed for a shipment of five boxes full of fish and shellfish packed in ice. I took them out to the dock and dropped them down the chute, and Pax stowed them. Between one of his calls and the next I filmed my first yoga session at the new place and felt renewed and happy.

We had that small time of joy and fulfillment together, where every soft coo of a dove and trill of a songbird was an affirmation. And then we had to go to dinner at the Bainbridges’.

* * *

I BROUGHT A bottle of wine and Pax brought a small succulent, both given to Sarah shortly after she answered the door. She made smarmy welcoming noises and ushered us inside.

Their home looked like it had just been cleaned, and it probably had. It felt more like a furniture showroom than a place in which people lived. The art had been bought with an eye to tying the room together, landscapes in soft earth tones, no statements being made there. I saw no guns or animals on the walls, but also saw no books. Perhaps they read in other rooms.

Sarah was in a different ensemble yet still sleeveless. She was proud of those toned arms, and who wouldn’t be? She introduced her husband, Stephen, who had a craft IPA in his left hand, which he cradled carefully while he shook hands with us. Tall and lean with a high forehead, light brown hair, prominent nose and less-than-prominent chin, he was definitely not the hunter type but more of a gatherer. My guess was that he gathered a paycheck at an office somewhere. He didn’t have the skin of someone who worked outdoors or with his hands. He seemed nice. His boys liked him—they came bounding in when they heard his call to come meet the new neighbors and quickly went for side hugs from their dad.

Taylor and Hunter were cute little dudes who practiced the manners they’d been coached on, saying all the right things and not farting and bare minimum stuff like that. They gave Pax an openmouthed stare for a moment—they clearly hadn’t expected a sophomore to be so tall.

Hunter, the younger boy, asked what Pax’s hat stood for. Pax had forgotten he was wearing it but remembered when he caught my disapproving gaze. He removed it hurriedly and said, “Tennessee,” before saying to Sarah, “Apologies for wearing my hat in your house, ma’am.”

“Oh, it’s fine. And you can call me Sarah, Pax.”

“No ma’am, I can’t. I apologize for that too. It’s just a thing.”

It was indeed a thing. I’d told Pax we needed to keep a formal distance with the Bainbridges, since we’d been warned against them. We did not want to encourage familiarity where Hunter and Taylor were coming over to hang out, and I would not be inviting Sarah over for yoga sessions. We would be polite and friendly, but not too friendly. Which was a shame, as I would have liked to have made a new friend. Our current situation meant I’d have to go outside of the neighborhood to find one.

Sarah told him he could hang it on a free hook of their hall tree, a varnished oak wood doohickey that featured a storage bench to sit on, while a panel behind it had hooks for coats and hats. It wasn’t the sort of thing you saw often in Tennessee, but they were fairly common in colder or wetter climes, like this one, where the weather often required hats and coats that would need to be shed upon entering the house. I remarked that I’d have to get one for our house and noted that the Bainbridges were all in socks, their shoes stored next to the hall tree on racks. I took my Vans off immediately and Pax followed suit.

We were ushered in, given drinks, and small talk ensued, with them asking how the unpacking was going and then asking Pax if he was excited about starting school next week.

“Excited is a word we could use,” he admitted, neglecting to offer any other words that might be more accurate. “But I’m going, regardless of how I feel about it.”

Stephen was in supply chain logistics with some side hustle contract work in programming, all of which he could do from home. “All deadly boring, but it pays the bills,” he explained. “And I can run the boys around to their sports and whatnot.”

Sarah, it turned out, was a pharmaceutical representative. “A legal drug pusher,” she said, laughing as if this were a joke. Pax and I maybe gave a polite quirk of the mouth but didn’t laugh. My brother—Pax’s uncle—like many in the trades and construction industry who dealt with persistent pain, had died of an opioid addiction, so I didn’t find it amusing.

“Is there anything I can do to help with dinner?” I asked.

“Oh, sure, if you’d like. It’s ready. You guys head into the dining room and we’ll be there shortly.”

Sarah led me into the kitchen, a stainless steel and white affair. There were two baskets of bread, one covered with red cloth and another covered in blue, and a crockpot.

“Hope you don’t mind meat and potatoes. It’s simple and filling and difficult to mess up.”

“Sounds perfect,” I said.

There was a pot roast with onions, potatoes, and carrots in thick gravy, and she had a giant pot of mashed potatoes on the stove. She asked me to transfer the roast and veggies into a large serving bowl and ferry everything out to the dining room table while she extracted the potatoes. The blue basket was gluten free and to be placed in front of Taylor. The red basket had gluten and was to be placed on the other side of the table from him.

By the time I’d made a few trips and made sure everyone was good to go on drinks, Sarah had the potatoes ready and we got down to business. Clinking silverware on plates, grunts and compliments, all of that, though we didn’t say Grace. She asked Pax about baseball but wanted to ask about Mr. Fisher, I could tell. She was looking for a way to get around to it. I’d give her an in after I found out something of my own first.

“So how long have you lived here?” I asked.

“Oh, about thirteen years. When we were pregnant with Hunter there.”

“Really? Any chance you ever met Jasper Henshaw’s daughters?”

“Christine and Candace? Oh yes. They didn’t stick around, though. Both took off like a shot as soon as they hit eighteen.”

“Really? Why was that? I mean—do you know?”

“I don’t know for sure, no. My wild speculation is that it had something to do with their mother’s disappearance.”

Stephen frowned at this. Apparently it was a subject he found distasteful. Or maybe he simply didn’t like mushy carrots.

“Mrs. Henshaw left them?”

“No—well, I suppose in one sense she did—I mean she disappeared. No note saying that she was leaving them, no relatives able to contact her. There were, you know…some suspicions. An investigation, in fact. But no evidence of foul play ever found. Probably because she was never found.”

“I didn’t know that,” Hunter said.

Stephen cleared his throat loudly and announced he needed another beer, and did anyone else want anything? I asked for a second glass of wine, because this was a disturbing development. Jasper had hidden the secret entrance to his stash room very well. He was a man who knew how to hide things. And there had been rooms in Mr. Fisher’s sublevels that he’d never shown us. If Jasper had been obsessed with keeping Mr. Fisher’s existence a secret—and I thought it fair to assume he had been—how far would he go to keep that secret? Say, if Mrs. Henshaw had found out and had not agreed to keep it quiet? For that matter, how far would Mr. Fisher go? Sarah didn’t give me enough time to think about it anymore, however, because she had a goal for this evening’s conversation and wanted to accomplish it.

“By the way, the couple who lives next door to you, the Sampsons, won’t be coming back until the spring—they are down in the desert for the rest of fall and winter. I just got an email from Millie and she said to tell you welcome. There’s a property manager that comes out once a month, but I keep an eye on the place too. They’re sweet people, it’s a shame you won’t get to meet them.”

“It is,” I said, and smiled, knowing what would come next. Sarah did not disappoint.

“Speaking of meeting your neighbors, did you get a chance to meet Mr. Fisher?”

“We did.”

The Bainbridges all dropped their silverware in shock, and Stephen, returning to the dining room with drinks, nearly dropped his precious IPA and my glass of wine.

“You did?” they practically chorused in unison, though Hunter said, “No way.”

“We did,” Pax confirmed.

“What’s he like?” Sarah asked.

I shrugged. “Eh. Nice old guy.” Pax nodded in agreement.

“How old?”

“I didn’t ask. It’s difficult to tell, sometimes, because people age differently, and I didn’t get a great look at him. He could be anything over sixty. He wanted us to take care of his garbage for him, the way Mr. Henshaw did.”

“Is he paying you?”

“Certainly not. We’re just being neighborly.”

“Did he come over to your place?”

“No, we sort of spoke through the hedge between our yards, and that’s why I didn’t see him well.”

“Fascinating. And did he tell you what he does all day?”

“Nope. He seems like a private individual who just needs a little bit of help.”

“Does he, though? Is he physically unable to roll a garbage can down to the curb?”

“I wouldn’t know. When he asked for help, I assumed he needed it.”

“Fair enough. And I’m sorry to grill you about it,” she said, though she very clearly wasn’t, “but his level of reclusiveness is extraordinary. I always wonder why he didn’t get a place way out in the country with no neighbors if he didn’t want to see anyone.”

“Being truly alone can be dangerous for older folk,” I said, though I immediately reflected that it held true for everyone. “The weekly garbage is a sort of rudimentary wellness check. Between that and his occasional deliveries, we know he’s doing okay in there.”

“But we don’t know what he’s doing.”

Pax spoke up. “He’s minding his own business.” He kept his tone light so as to not make it seem like criticism, but it absolutely was. Sarah dropped the subject, especially since he followed up by saying her pot roast was delicious and wondered if he could have seconds.

Yet that was also the final nail in the coffin of our nascent friendship. We’d met the guy she’d been trying to meet for thirteen years and told her to mind her own beeswax. Since she was in sales, she would have a competitive streak and like to win, and most likely resented losing. By swooping in and meeting Mr. Fisher, we’d placed ourselves pretty high on her shit list.

Not that she would do anything about it during dinner. She maintained a frosty politeness, but there wasn’t any dessert, though Taylor thought there would be. We thanked them and left as soon as possible, and I felt sorry for the succulent Pax had brought them. She was going to kill it.

* * *

PAX’S RETURN TO school was uncomfortable but bearable. I got him an Oregon hat, a black one with a yellow O on it, and he made a point of seeking out the baseball coach. That allowed him to meet several players over the course of the day and he was on his way to fitting in. The kids who’d bullied him gave him dirty looks but kept their mouths shut. Once he’d finished his homework, I joined him at Mr. Fisher’s.

The Keerro was surprised to see me, but he recovered and the translation device was as cultured as ever.

“Ah, Mrs. Chisholm. Welcome. You’ll be pleased to hear that I think we can safely get me out of here over the weekend,” he said. “Sunday night would likely be best.”

“That’s great, yeah, sure. Listen, Mr. Fisher, I need to ask you about Jasper’s wife. Specifically, what happened to her?”

Mr. Fisher went still. “You mean Darla Henshaw?”

“Yes.”

“She disappeared eleven years, four months, and nine days ago.”

“That’s very specific. Did you have anything to do with her disappearance?”

“No. But I have always wondered what happened to her.”

“Did Jasper have anything to do with it?”

“He said he didn’t, and it is possible he didn’t. However, it’s most likely he did. Because eleven years, four months, and ten days ago, Darla found out about me.”

Pax and I exchanged a glance. That timing was really, really bad. And that was a key piece of information that anyone investigating her disappearance would not have had.

“Did anyone come to question you about it?”

“Yes. Police came on a few occasions and knocked on my door. The fact that I never answered made me a person of interest, and they came in with a search warrant. And they found nothing, of course, because access to these levels is very well hidden. We had to secure a lawyer to speak on my behalf. Eventually interest waned.”

“But you suspected Jasper might have made her disappear.”

“The odds are he killed her, hid the body, and lied about it, yes.”

“And you still maintained your relationship?”

“I didn’t have any other realistic choices available.” He performed a sinuous head bob to the west. “My other neighbors have a peculiar hatred for humans who possess different skin tones than theirs and strongly oppose such people coming to live here from elsewhere. Anti-immigrant sentiment, I believe it’s called.”

“Or racist bullshit, but yeah,” Pax said.

“If they are unable to accept other humans slightly different from them living next door, they would hardly be able to accept me. I had to keep ties with Jasper, or I would not have been able to continue working on my return home.”

“How did she find you?”

“A thorough housecleaning, apparently, caused her to accidentally press the button revealing Jasper’s hidden room. She found the trap door, came down the ladder, and surprised me.”

“I’m sure you surprised her too,” I said, remembering the shock. “Did she lose her shit?”

“Very loudly, yes. And then Jasper came, explained, and they left together. I never saw her again.”

The possibilities here were entirely unsavory. He might have hidden her body somewhere in the house—a skilled craftsman such as he could have pulled off something like that, especially if he decided to start by adding a hidden room onto his hidden room. But if his daughters were around, it’s more likely that he moved Darla’s body elsewhere. Regardless—even if he were innocent and someone else had made her disappear—the tenor of the household would have become dark and scary. I understood now why Christine and Candace fled at their first opportunity. What had I done, after all, when Benny passed? And now I felt like fleeing again. This was like a deal with the devil, where all the great stuff you got only cost your soul. The headline of meet a rich talking otter was significantly dampened when you read on and saw while you live in the home of a man who probably murdered his innocent wife in small print. And of course, it was possible that Mr. Fisher was lying about all of this. We had no idea what he was capable of, beyond, you know, traveling to alternate universes and fusion and tiny things like that.

I checked the time on my phone. “Call me at the top of every hour,” I said to Pax. “Don’t make me come down here.”

“Okay, I will,” he agreed, and I left them to continue their preparations. Apparently the pink pods were all packed, and these last preparations were all about testing components and failsafes and power supply. I had housecleaning to do, starting with Jasper’s secret lair.

* * *

WEED FLUSHED AND whiskey poured down the drain, art catalogued, and a plan formulated to donate it anonymously to a museum, I sat down to tackle the journals of the late Jasper Henshaw, which were stored on his cheap shelves and read like he expected them to be historical records someday. I logged dates heading back years, and discovered that there was a significant gap eleven years, four months, and some days ago. An entire year was missing.

“You guilty, murdering bastard,” I said.

But he had been a meticulous man who thought highly of himself when he wasn’t stoned out of his gourd (or from a gourd, as I discovered several creative bongs made from dried and lacquered fruits and vegetables). Would he truly have destroyed his records, or just hidden them? The latter seemed more likely to me. As it was highly unlikely he had hidden them in the main house where anyone could find them, they must exist somewhere in the stash room. It deserved a thorough inspection.

I started with the walls, knocking on them to discover any hollow spaces. It all sounded solid. I looked behind the bookcase. No hidden door or safe. No hidden safe anywhere, so far as I could tell.

Studying the writing desk likewise revealed no treasures. No false bottoms, no hidden studs that opened a panel somewhere. Then I remembered that journal he’d left for his successor. He had listed multiple storage units and safe deposit boxes.

“Aw, hell,” I said.

Well, it would give me something to do while we counted down to Mr. Fisher’s leavetaking.

* * *

ON TUESDAY, I visited three storage units crammed full of priceless art and dust. (Isn’t dust supposed to be largely dead skin cells? Who the hell’s skin was all over these?) I sneezed a lot and realized I’d have to rent a truck to donate it all, but while I did find a box full of receipts and provenance for the paintings, I found no journals. I’d say the paintings were all from the private collection of Mr. Fisher. Jasper Henshaw would not be getting any recognition for these. I toyed with the idea of giving the paintings to his daughters to dispose of, but that would open me up to a series of uncomfortable questions about how I’d found them. And it might reopen wounds on old traumas. Selling the house had probably been cathartic for them and they were most likely relieved to be free of it, if they were feeling anywhere close to what I felt about Benny’s passing. Calling them up and dragging them back into his secrets would not be kind.

The safe deposit boxes I visited Wednesday were another matter.

* * *

IT’S REALLY, REALLY strange to discover a box full of material you could use to blackmail city officials. Lewd, nude pictures of people built for comfort, not speed. And it was all done, no doubt, in the name of keeping Mr. Fisher safe. But I didn’t know if any of it was still valid. Would these people continue to leave Mr. Fisher alone, now that Jasper Henshaw had passed? Did they even realize they were free of it? It did put a ticking clock on things, so far as I was concerned. Mr. Fisher was vulnerable now and wasn’t leaving too soon.

The second safe deposit box was the heartbreaker. Full of pictures of Darla and Jasper Henshaw and their kids, Christine and Candace. He must have cleared them all out of his house. And it also contained the missing journal covering the year that Darla had disappeared.

I snatched it out of there, looking for the proper date, and found that ten sheets or so had been torn out—the day before her disappearance, and presumably several days afterward. Entries past that never mentioned her. Probably all of the missing pages contained incriminating passages—a confession, even. But that left me nothing but circumstantial evidence, nothing to conclusively prove that Jasper was guilty, though it was a concluded matter in my mind.

I resolved to donate what I could and burn the rest. Exorcise Jasper Henshaw from my life as much as possible. Though I didn’t think that I’d be able to remain in the house in comfort after that. Every corner would echo with loss, and that was not the kind of space I needed. Perhaps, after Mr. Fisher was gone, Pax wouldn’t mind moving again if we found a place together that worked for both of us.

Renting a van and loading up the artwork from the various storage units occupied the rest of my day, and putting in a phone call to arrange a donation to the Portland Museum of Art. I catalogued the paintings with Mr. Fisher’s help and learned that his first name—for purposes of human identification and taxes—was Otto.

“Otto? Seriously?”

“Jasper thought it funny at the time,” he explained.

“Okay then. This will be the Otto Fisher Collection. How are the preparations going?”

“Excellent. Backups and failsafes have been tested. I am currently running through contingency plans and making sure those are ready. I cannot thank you and Pax enough for this final push to get me home.”

“What you’re leaving behind is more than thanks enough.”

Indeed, his piles of cash would allow us to leave the place behind as well.

* * *

DONATIONS DELIVERED, THE flotsam of Jasper Henshaw’s history burned, a flurry of errands and legal arcana signing over Mr. Fisher’s assets to us, and Pax’s school week endured, we were finally ready.

A pleasant Saturday evening at Mr. Fisher’s place allowed him to instruct me on my limited role in assembling his quantum displacement matrix, which I understood about as much as movie gadgets like the flux capacitor and the neuralyzer. I got what would happen when it activated—the contents of the river here and on Watercourse would essentially trade places—but how it actually worked I had no idea.

We then watched Jurassic Park and asked Mr. Fisher how accurate it was compared to the dinosaurs on Watercourse.

“Well, they eat each other like that and drop enormous piles of dung, but…that’s about it. Your velociraptors don’t have enough feathers.”

We showed him Prehistoric Planet, a more recent documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough incorporating the latest science and rendering the animals with feathers, and he declared that was much closer.

“I have no plans to see any dinosaurs in person, of course.” He shook his head rapidly, which had the effect of making his entire body twist a little bit. “I’m not that kind of ranger.”

“What’s the number one thing you’re looking forward to when you get back home?” Pax asked.

“Fresh salmon,” he replied, his eyes closing in imagined pleasure.

“Really? We have fresh salmon here.”

“Ours aren’t loaded up with heavy metals and microplastics.”

“Oh, yeah, no. I can see how that would make a difference, yeah.”

* * *

WE WAITED UNTIL the sun had fully set on Sunday before heading out to our dock to take the fun slide down to Mr. Fisher’s. I had to admit it was about five thousand times more enjoyable than descending that narrow ladder from Jasper’s secret murder room.

“Full moon out tonight,” I observed. “Not ideal for concealment, but I guess it’ll be good for us as we try to work in the dark.”

“Yeah,” Pax agreed. “Folks will be watching Sunday night football and paying zero attention to the river. This is good.”

We had on wetsuits and water shoes because we’d be getting in and out of the river quite a bit and wanted to keep our body temperature fairly consistent. We squatted on the dock and Pax pressed the hidden stud that slid the dock aside and then used the intercom to ask Mr. Fisher if he was ready for us.

“Ready!” his translated voice crackled. “Come on down!”

Pax grinned at me. “I love this thing.” He dropped down into the chute and hollered, “Wooo-hoo!”

It was a good time. I waited a few beats and then I followed, hollering my own barbaric yawp.

Mr. Fisher was waiting as I rolled off the mattress and joined Pax. The Keerro was standing on his hind legs and clapping his little otter hands together, his body swaying like one of those balloon men at a car dealership.

“This is very exciting,” he said. “Decades in the making. It will be so wondrous to go home. I see you are ready. Shall we begin?”

Pax clapped his hands once. “Let’s do this.”

We had taken maybe four or five steps away from the mattress when we heard a woman’s high scream doppler shifting in our direction—that is, getting louder. Behind us.

The three of us spun around, facing the slide, and out of it plunged none other than Sarah Bainbridge. She hit the mattress, phone in hand, and immediately scrambled off it, eyes wide and twitching like she’d just inhaled a whole eight-ball of cocaine.

“What the fuck? What is this place?” she shouted.

“What are you doing here?” I shouted back.

“Ahhh! What the fuck is that! What the fuck is that!” She was pointing past us with her free hand and had clearly seen Mr. Fisher.

“None of your business because you are trespassing on private property.”

I began to close the distance between us, arms wide, and she raved. “Is this a secret lab where you’re experimenting on animals? What the fuck! Stay away!”

She remembered her phone and pointed the camera behind me.

“No, do not take any pictures,” I said, but even as I did, I heard the telltale click of the shutter, and that meant I had to confiscate that phone and delete the photo, and if that photo had uploaded to the cloud, I needed to delete it there too. So I grabbed at the phone, missed, but managed to knock it out of her hand when the heel of my palm collided with her wrist and numbed her fingers for a split second.

“Bitch!” she cried, and the two of us both dove for the phone. I was faster and got there first, but it left me vulnerable, because she grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled.

There was nothing for it after that: we were in a fight. Those arms of hers were no joke—she punched hard. But I threw elbows and crunched one into her nose, and that got her off me. I tossed her phone to Pax while it was still unlocked. “Delete the photo everywhere,” said, and my words got Sarah back to her feet. A deep roar welled from her and she was all in. She was actually going to charge Pax.

But then there was a sound like someone spitting out a watermelon seed, something about that size sank into Sarah’s torso, and she seized up, flailed, and collapsed, twitching for a few seconds before lapsing into unconsciousness.

Pax and I looked back to Mr. Fisher. He was holding a very tiny but unmistakable projectile weapon.

“Where did that come from?” I asked.

“My pocket. Otters have pockets, you know.” And he demonstrated by essentially stuffing the weapon into a fold of skin underneath his arm.

“Whoa. Like a built-in shoulder holster,” Pax said.

“So you’ve been armed the whole time and we didn’t know?” I said.

“I believe that is accurate, yes. Don’t worry, she’ll revive after a while. Perhaps we should discuss what will happen when she does.”

“She’ll demand we let her go and if we don’t, it’s kidnapping. Or abduction. There’s a difference but I forget. As it is, I’m looking at assault and battery charges, maybe assault with a weapon if she decides to blame me for getting shocked, and anything else she can try to charge me with. Possession of an unlicensed animal.”

Mr. Fisher flinched. “You mean me?”

“Yes. She didn’t hear you talk, which is good. She doesn’t know that you’re Mr. Fisher. But she’ll make a lot of noise and get this place investigated.”

“But what about the trespassing?” Pax asked. “Doesn’t that forgive a lot of what you did?”

“Maybe. Except it’s technically Mr. Fisher’s place, not ours. It’s not good, not good at all. We might be able to win out in the end with a good lawyer, but if she’s able to get me arrested, Pax, then that means you’re going to be taken by the state and put in a foster home.”

“Pardon me for saying so, Mom, but fuck that.”

“I don’t see an easy way out here. We can’t keep her long and she’s going to come for me with everything she’s got once we let her go. Maybe we can just keep her for the night, get Mr. Fisher out of here, and then wire a bunch of money to some country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States, and live like fugitives. We’d be able to afford it, at least.”

“That’s not good, but it’s preferable to you going to jail. How’d she even get down here?”

“You mean how did she see us go down the slide? Good question—oh. I bet she was next door at the Sampsons’. She said she popped by there every so often.”

“Probably to spy on us.”

“Which totally worked, if so. Did you get the photo deleted?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Turn it off and let’s get the SIM card out.”

Mr. Fisher spoke up. “We should get her in a secure place before she wakes up.”

Quirking an eyebrow, I said, “You have a secure place?”

“I do. Follow me and bring her.”

Pax took the head and I took the feet. We lugged Sarah to one of those rooms Mr. Fisher never showed us before, with dingy yellow lights and beige walls inside. There was also a bunk, toilet, and sink clearly not designed for otters.

“You built a prison cell for humans?” I asked.

“As a backup plan—a contingency. One of several I’m glad I thought of. Because this is a very unfortunate development.”

We gently placed her on the bunk and exited, then Mr. Fisher did something to a small pad mounted on the wall next to it and we heard multiple locks engage and the panel glowed red.

“There. She won’t cause trouble in the short term. Now, if I understand correctly,” the Keerro said, “you’re fairly certain that because of this incident you won’t be able to live next door anymore and these premises will therefore be insecure?”

“Correct. She is going to make sure your house is thoroughly searched.”

“Regrettable. But I did plan for something similar. The only question is what you wish to do.”

“About what?”

“You can flee, as you suggested, but there is another option. You can come with me.”

“What?” I said at the same time Pax gushed, “For reals?”

“You’re looking at a new life no matter what. Why not a new life on Watercourse?”

“Yes!” Pax said.

“Hold on,” I held up a hand and shot him a quelling look before turning to Mr. Fisher. “And do what, exactly?”

“See what no humans have ever seen before. Live in freedom. Be ambassadors of your species. Your every material need will be met. And after some time has passed—enough that they won’t be looking at the river anymore—you can come back.”

I ignored the promise to return, like we were just going on vacation, and focused on the middle bit. “Every material need, huh? Does that mean we’ll be zoo animals and you’ll feed us kibble in our cages?” I hooked a thumb at the door behind us. “Or a nice cozy cell?”

“No. We don’t even have zoos. Caging animals for entertainment is one of many human ideas I won’t be sharing. You will be treated as honored guests. And you might even be able to negotiate the rights for humans to settle on an unspoiled version of the planet for which we have no use.”

“You would just give us a new version of Earth to settle on?”

“Why not? We can’t have you on Watercourse in any significant numbers, considering the ample proof we have of how poorly you treat your home.”

“How do you guarantee any of this? Are you speaking for your government?”

“Yes. Quantum rangers like myself are able to make deals for simple things like your safety while on Watercourse and a return to your version of the planet. So that is what I am offering: a safe and beautiful place to hide for a while, and after my people have had time digest the wealth of information I’m bringing, they’ll want to return, and you can come along, either to stay or to recruit other humans to live…elsewhere. All you need to do is decide which way you’re going to run, and then we’ll proceed.”

“Whoa. Mom. Don’t even think. When a giant otter asks if you want to come chill on his planet, you say yes.”

“No, Pax. Think it through. No Internet or video games. No friends. No girls. No dogs, just otters and dinosaurs. No medical help if we get sick or injured, and no fruits or vegetables, for crying out loud. We’d die of malnutrition.”

“We have fruits and vegetables and bees, that sort of thing,” Mr. Fisher said. “Slightly different from yours, of course, but entirely edible, and pesticide free. You will have no shortage of people eager to find out what we can safely feed you.”

“See, Mom? And think about what else that won’t be there and thank goodness: No white supremacists. No social media. No oil companies. No twenty-four-hour news cycle.”

“Well, we do have news services on Watercourse,” Mr. Fisher said, “but happily, none of it is owned by the Murdoch or Sinclair families.”

“There you go,” Pax said. “We take off, eat a lot of fish, play on the water slides—you guys have water slides, right?”

“We have water slides unlike any you have ever seen.”

“Boom. And we make a plan to return and reboot the planet in a couple of months.”

“There won’t be any coffee, Pax. You wouldn’t last two days, let alone two months.”

“Oh.” That finally punctured his swelling balloon of excitement. “Oh, wait—are you sure? They have to have coffee, right, Mr. Fisher? Somewhere?”

“That hot breakfast liquid? That particular plant may not have evolved on Watercourse. Bring some beans and tell us how they are prepared, and we will attempt to replicate it.”

There would be no way for them to replicate brown-eyed bearded baristas in flannel shirts, but I left that out. “How would we even go with you?”

“I remove the contents of a pod and refit it for your occupation. You bring whatever small items you require to resume your life some months hence—ID, credit cards, and so on. We proceed as planned. The difference is that I will activate a sequence to destroy this place and the displacement matrix after we leave so that none of my secrets will be revealed. Our return will be easier if your government never realizes what happened here.”

“But what about her?” I said, pointing to the cell.

“The door will unlock as part of the sequence. So long as she chooses to get out, she’ll live. So: Will you stay on Earth, or come to Watercourse? We need to proceed either way.”

* * *

“SARAH? HELLOOO.” HOURS later, I tapped the shatterproof glass in the door, which was placed at Mr. Fisher’s height, not mine, so I had to stoop a bit to look through it. She saw me, rose from her bunk, and pounded her fist against it.

“Let me out!” She added some unkind names I shall not repeat.

“You are going to be freed. Listen.” There was a slot in the door designed to deliver meals, and I passed through a hand-drawn map of the third sublevel. “Study that. It’s your way out. When the door opens, you will find your phone and the SIM card sitting out here on a stool. It’s right behind me.” I neglected to inform her that the phone was fully submerged in a glass of salt water and we had wiped a very strong magnet against the SIM card several times. “Grab them and follow the map precisely and get out as fast as you can, because this whole place is going to explode five minutes after the door opens. All these sublevels, the house up top—obliterated. You don’t want to be here when it goes. So you’re going to take the front lift, which will put you in the delivery shed in the front yard. Make sure you hit the up button rather than down. If you go down, you probably won’t get out in time. Get off the property as soon as you can. The explosion will most likely throw debris at high velocity in every direction. Got it?”

She was shaking her head. “First of all: Bullshit. And second, even if it isn’t, you think blowing up this house will fix everything? You’re finished, Winnie Mae. You and your boy are going to pay, and that freak animal is going to be locked up and put down.”

“I might pay, it’s true, but it won’t be you that gets me. It’ll be something else. Maybe a dinosaur. You’ll never get to see. You’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that you were close to learning something wondrous, but you were just too small-minded and untrustworthy to be included.”

“There’s nowhere you can hide from me,” she growled. “I’ll make it my life’s mission to take you down.”

“That’s such a sad mission for your life. Try to do better, Sarah. Okay, remember, you have only five minutes from when the door opens to get clear. Please believe me so you can be there for Hunter and Taylor. And bless your heart, your pot roast was terrible and you can’t bake for shit. I’m out.”

Her roars of outrage as I walked away were pretty sweet. She saw her phone sitting in water through the window and lost her mind.

* * *

THE SILENT WATERS behind my house held the mysteries of the universe after all, even though they never spoke of them to me. Quantum worlds full of alternate timelines, roads we never took, some worse but many objectively better than ours. Benny would have been delighted to find out that water was the key to everything, just like he thought.

I missed him so much.

* * *

WE WOULD NEVER be able to outrun our memories of Benny or our grief over his loss, but we could run from Sarah Bainbridge and every other thing on Earth, like taxes and the police and cascading ecological collapse. And once I realized that I would be stressed out and worried on any planet in the multiverse and it would be dangerous either way, but one way was guaranteed to make Pax happy, it was an easy decision. Pax presented it starkly: “You can be a fugitive on a dying planet surrounded by seven billion assholes, or you can be a fugitive on a vibrant planet surrounded by otters with cool gadgets.”

We might wind up getting eaten by some kind of kaiju megasaur thing, but I figured we already knew how to avoid shark attacks on Earth: don’t swim with the sharks. The same principle would keep us safe on Watercourse. And my son would smile instead of sulk, so I’d take it.

Once the decision was made, we all had a lot to do, and the clock was ticking. The longer we took, the more likely that Stephen or the Bainbridge boys would come looking for Sarah and catch us doing something weird in the river.

Not that it looked especially dangerous or anything. It would just be hard to explain what we were doing with seven large pink eggs floating in the river. The color, I found out, was a protocol. When a quantum ranger returned from a new version of Earth, the pink color let everyone know that the cargo pods were to be quarantined and that the river filters downstream should be replaced. And—crucially—there might be new species aboard, and great care should be taken to make sure they were safe for Watercourse before anything else.

I hoped we would be safe as I scrambled to get IDs, some durable yet comfortable clothes, toiletries, and Lord, some coffee. I wrote a huge check and a quick letter to a property manager in Salem, telling him to take care of our place and giving him limited power of attorney to pay bills until the money ran out, and stuffed it into an envelope with the keys. I just plastered it with stamps and shoved it in the mailbox, prayed that would be enough so we had a house to come back to, then ran down to our dock and leapt in the river.

Pax and Mr. Fisher had brought the cargo pods from underground via his lift in the backyard, and then used a custom wheeled dolly to take them down to the river. When I returned, they were corralling the pods with a net that Mr. Fisher anchored to the bottom of the river, a floating foam top keeping them from simply rolling over and floating away. Five were full of various things he wanted to take back, and two were mostly empty save for air filters we’d need for the trip.

His quantum displacement matrix was essentially a twelve-piece affair and a whole lot of insulated power cable that ran from his massive battery to these devices. Each bank got six contour and flow compilers—three fixed on the riverbed, and three floating on the surface by the bank. Mr. Fisher secured the underwater ones first, and he then needed us to align the floating ones above them precisely, and when he was satisfied, he clicked something and they came to life, softly humming and performing some kind of propulsion against the current to remain still in the water once we removed our steadying hands. They were sleek cool gray things, no sharp angles or corners to them, and they had some soft glowing blue and yellow lights on them but no knobs or visible screws. Without the lights they might be mistaken for river rocks. It definitely looked like alien tech, which he’d had to fabricate himself after first fabricating the subterranean facility to manufacture it, all of which had taken him decades of time and piles of money.

These compilers ran on their own closed network and exchanged a dizzying amount of information about the contents of the river, which necessarily included us. In order to make a successful trip, we’d need to be fully submersed, and the cargo pods apparently had the capability to become submersibles.

Getting the compilers placed and secured took about fifteen minutes each, so that was ninety minutes, and another half hour or forty-five minutes had passed before that, while I’d made my frenzied rush around the house to get us packed and Pax had moved the cargo pods out. So it was probably to be expected that just as we powered up the compilers and they were lit up like fireflies on the river, Stephen Bainbridge’s voice floated over the water, calling out for Sarah. She was long overdue back home and had obviously not responded to any calls or texts that Stephen had made.

The lights of the compilers and the pink pods in the river, visible in the moonlight, drew Stephen down to the dock, where he managed to see us.

“What the—Winnie Mae? Is that you?”

“Hi, Stephen, yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Science experiment,” I said, taking the Doc Brown approach from Back to the Future. You could explain away most any weird thing if you told people it was for science. Stephen, unfortunately, was the curious sort.

“What kind of experiment?”

“Is it okay if I explain later? We’re kind of in the middle of it and need to keep going.”

“Oh, right. Sure. I don’t suppose you’ve seen Sarah, have you? She came over here to the Sampsons’ a few hours ago and hasn’t come back, and isn’t responding on her phone either. I’m a bit worried.”

“Goodness, no, we haven’t seen her. If we do, we’ll tell her to ping you. I hope you find her soon.”

“Thanks.”

“You bet.”

He lingered on the Sampsons’ dock but didn’t say anything else, so we ignored him. Mr. Fisher was underwater at the moment, and if he surfaced soon, I hoped he wouldn’t make a big splash or be very visible.

It turned out I was worried about the wrong thing. Mr. Fisher did indeed surface, but it was right underneath the Sampsons’ dock, and he pulled out the tiny stunner weapon from his built-in shoulder holster and shot Stephen Bainbridge. The poor man never knew what hit him. He flopped and twitched and fell unconscious on the dock. Mr. Fisher quickly scrambled out of the water, grabbed Stephen’s phone from his pocket, and tossed it in the river. He plucked out the little projectile and tossed that too, then he dove back into the water, leaving the man spread-eagled in the moonlight.

Moments later he rejoined us by the pods, water sheeting off his fur, and his translator glowed around his neck.

“Another unfortunate development, but contained for the moment. We have about a half hour before he’ll wake, and we should be gone in fifteen minutes.”

“That fast?”

“Provided that the conditions are satisfactory here and on Watercourse, yes. The compilers are already mapping the riverbed, which I have kept exactly as it was when I arrived, both by artificial and natural means. Connection with Watercourse should be solid. We’ll get the cargo pods sunk, climb into our own pods, and run a diagnostic. Then we submerge ourselves, run one final check, and activate the matrix. That will send us to Watercourse and free Sarah from her room. My house will be demolished five minutes later, and the compilers will detonate also.”

He swam sinuously over to his personal pod and opened it on its internal hinges, climbing in with a minimum of water spillage. I had little hope that Pax or I would be so graceful.

His was full of Keerro instruments and buttons and screens, doubtless linked to his matrix and providing him all sorts of information. He poked at a pad and the five pods that contained nothing but cargo hissed as air was released and they submerged, moving into the center of the river as they did so. They were far more complex than I realized at first; he’d basically built submarine drones.

“You’re next,” he said. “We have to be submerged for a few minutes before we actually transit. Lots of data to scan, compile and send.”

Pax got in first, and I was right to assume we’d be less graceful about it than Mr. Fisher. It nearly capsized and sat lower in the water, and I didn’t know how I’d get in too without spilling us both into the river. Mr. Fisher activated it and said a minor bit of propulsion would help it stay upright as I climbed in. It was awkward and uncomfortable, especially with a big suitcase in there crammed full of our clothes; we had to sit with our knees scrunched up against our chests, but we managed.

“I didn’t have time to make your pod completely recycling as it was originally intended for cargo. But the portable recycler and filter I installed should provide you with hours of air. Luckily, you will only need five to ten minutes here, and perhaps a half hour, hopefully less, on Watercourse as they move you into a quarantine facility. It is important that you do not open the pod until you’re in the facility—in fact, let us do it. I promise we’ll do it as quickly as possible. And here—catch this receiver.”

He tossed what was essentially the equivalent of a Bluetooth speaker to us, and Pax caught it. “I will communicate to you through this and keep you apprised of what’s happening.” We tested it, confirmed that it worked, and then he asked if we were ready.

Pax said yes immediately, but only I managed a weak nod as my brain started feeding me nightmare scenarios where the matrix malfunctioned and sent us to some other place, or we suffocated in the pod, or we were simply being brought back to Watercourse as a sort of sampler platter and giant otters would soon invade Earth to eat us all once they figured out we were tasty.

I looked up at the night sky one last time, saying farewell to our stars and moon. Would they be the same on Watercourse, or just slightly different? The lid closed with a clunk and hiss, and the air thingie audibly turned on and whirred, already working to keep us alive in a sealed container. So the suffocating thing wouldn’t happen immediately, and that was a relief. But we started moving and there was a change in the acoustics as we submerged, and oh yeah, it was totally dark. No lighting. Which meant I could cry silently without alarming Pax.

I was experiencing those feelings of terror one gets as a plane is about to take off, that feeling of helplessness that you’re trapped in a metal tube and dependent on the pilot and the mechanics and the weather to make sure you survive the journey, except you don’t know if you can trust any of them. Had I made a fatal decision? Maybe we should have fled to Morocco, or maybe Nepal, and waited for the slow-rolling apocalypse to arrive?

Mr. Fisher’s voice on the speaker interrupted my doom spiral.

“Everything’s looking good, you’re headed to the middle of the river. About to shut myself in and join you. Mr. Bainbridge is still unconscious. Soon I will be home, you will be safe, and we will be free of this world’s wide selection of poisons and toxins.”

“I wonder if we’ll be able to smell the difference in the air we breathe,” Pax said.

“I bet we will. They probably have different flowers. But we might not get to smell it right away. If we’re going into quarantine, we’ll probably be in a small sterile room somewhere for a while.”

“Oh yeah. That’s going to suck.”

Mr. Fisher gave us another update. “I’m now submerged and holding steady with you and the other cargo. Right now the matrix is scanning and compiling everything about us, for we are now part of the water to be displaced. You might feel warmed.”

I’m glad he said that, because I was experiencing something akin to what a hot flash must feel like.

“It’s also seeking similar river conditions on alternate planets and displaying a list of possible destinations on my screen. There are even more of them now than when I first came here. But ah, there it is: The coordinates for Watercourse just showed up and I have selected them. We’re locked in. It’s running a final check of all systems and preparing for quantum displacement.”

Pax made a small squee of excitement, for which I was grateful, because it reminded me that there were other ways to feel than nervous and frightened.

Time stretched in the darkness and lost all meaning. I concentrated on breathing to calm myself. There would be no therapists on Watercourse to help me work on my tendency to run from my feelings. It would be fair to say that I was willing to run farther than anyone else in history rather than face the fact that I had it perfect for a while and I’d never have it again.

I’d probably done twenty cycles of deep breaths when Mr. Fisher announced, “All clear. Activating matrix and self-destruct sequence now. The door to Sarah’s cell will open and she’ll have five minutes to escape the house.”

Wait. What if⁠—

* * *

MY HEAD HURT. I couldn’t see anything. Where—oh.

“Pax? Pax, are you there? Are you okay?”

“Uggh.”

Alive, then. What had happened?

“Rougher reentry than I would have wished,” Mr. Fisher’s voice said into the black, “but we made it! We’re on Watercourse. I hope you’re all right. Stay calm and we’ll get you out of there as soon as possible. You’ll be surfacing in a moment and then your pod will be collected and transported to quarantine. We’ll get you translator devices like mine so that you can speak to other otters and vice versa.”

“Uggh,” Pax said again. “I think I hit my head.”

“Me too. We should have had seat belts or something.”

The air still seemed fine and I could hear the recycler working, so that was good. But I couldn’t wait to be able to see something again and confirm we were actually safe. And I wished there was some way to confirm that Sarah got out of the house okay.

We heard water sloshing outside the pod as we surfaced, followed soon afterward by lots of squeaks and chirps. The pod moved, jerked a bit, and we were jostled enough that we hit our heads on the interior of the pod again.

“Ow! Yeah. This was not designed with us in mind,” Pax said.

The jostling kept happening, unfortunately, as we were removed from the water and transported over land to a secure facility.

“I am so excited,” Mr. Fisher said. “To be able to see my own kind again—well, it’s been a dream for many years. I’ve been communicating with them since we arrived and they thought I died years ago because it’s been so long. I told them you’re in there and they’re going to put us in a room together and get you translator devices. It will be a lot of adjustment, of course, and we will see to your privacy and needs as soon as possible. But after we get out of quarantine, such wonders await you! There’s an amazing water park upriver I know you’ll enjoy, Pax.”

Pax giggled. “So cool. I can’t wait.”

A few minutes later, our pod ceased moving and the squeaks receded.

“We’re here,” Mr. Fisher said. “They’re sealing the room and then we can get out.”

It was only a few beats later that the pod unsealed with a hiss and bright light stabbed into our eyes. Blinking furiously and willing my pupils to shrink so that I could see, I saw a brown room with a large wall of glass ahead of us. The other side was also painted brown—or perhaps was naturally so. We might be underground.

On the other side of the glass were about ten Keerro, whiskers twitching, some of them standing on their hind legs to get a better look at us. They appeared very surprised by our appearance—or maybe they were simply excited. Mr. Fisher certainly was. He bounded out of his pod and went right up to the glass, squeaking loudly, which got translated for us by his device.

“I’m home! Finally home! I need salmon that doesn’t taste like shit! And look! I brought humans! These two are very nice and helped me return. Look at their freaky limbs and wacky teeth! And can someone tell my family I made it back?”

Pax was laughing. “It’s all real. We’re on a different timeline where Earth became a planet of talking otters.”

“Where we have freaky limbs and wacky teeth,” I said.

“Well, we have to look very strange to them if they haven’t seen anything like us before.”

“True enough. I guess if we’re ambassadors of our species, we should be friendly and dignified. Let’s wave.”

Our simple coordinated wave with our freaky limbs sent the Keerro into a frenzy of wiggling.

Pax laughed again. “Wow. So much serotonin right now.”

* * *

IT TOOK THREE weeks of patient talking and submitting to tests, but eventually we were cleared to leave the quarantine facility and see what Watercourse actually looked like.

It was, in a word, beautiful.

The air was oxygen-rich and heavy with the natural perfumes of vegetation. So many insects and birdcalls, the croaks of amphibians, and grunts and chatter of other creatures. No background noise of far-off traffic, aircraft, or the low-level drone of appliances plugged in to the wall. No buildings of concrete, steel, and glass rising into the air. We had indeed been underground, and Watercourse was still very much a green planet as a result. And the sashimi? Absolutely incredible, once the Keerro understood that we ate nothing but the flesh and liked it cut up. Our wacky teeth weren’t designed to let us tear into the fish, guts and bones and all.

Mr. Fisher was very kind and expected we’d want to return to Earth as soon as possible, because that was a sentiment with which he could empathize. He was doing all he could to get our return funded, supplied, and scheduled, but Pax and I gently told him we weren’t in any hurry. Going back to Earth would be a big dose of drama and we didn’t crave it.

During a yoga session down by the river months later, I was taking stock of where my worries were, what stage of grief I might be in, and wondering what had happened to all my doom spirals. It reminded me that a thing people often say to those who are grieving is that their deceased loved ones are in a better place now. It gets said and accepted without too much examination because there’s a tangled mess of snakes and faith lying underneath those words, and it’s better to be thankful for the well-wishes behind them than to question whether such places actually exist and if our loved ones made it there. What Watercourse showed me is that there are definitely better places. An infinite number of them, in fact. So I could feel sure, for the first time, that Benny was in one, and remarkably, we were too.

The Keerro had made it a planetary priority to find the freaky hairless creatures some coffee, and they found some on an alternate earth that they were willing to give to us. They even learned how to process and roast it for us. Some of them got hooked on it too, and let me tell you, there’s something truly special about giant caffeinated otters.

Soon, we would return to our Earth and attempt to recruit some people who were willing to start from scratch on a new version of home, but with a singular advantage over the old one: fusion power, courtesy of the Keerro. Fossil fuels would be prohibited, and corporations too. Maybe we could get it right given a second chance, some fantastic coffee varietals, and a good look at an alternative way of living.

It was a project fraught with difficulties and was bound to run up against authorities at some point, but we couldn’t sit back and let humanity hurtle off a cliff when there was an alternative. Maybe I could find one of those hunky bearded baristas to join us, and some families with kids Pax’s age.

Hope can be such a balm, and Mr. Fisher had led us to an endless font of it on Watercourse.

OceanofPDF.com