An ambush of years, p.1
An Ambush of Years, page 1
An Ambush of Years
Time Alleys Book 1
J.A. Enfield
Copyright © 2024 by J.A. Enfield
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by Dorothy Zemach
Cover art by Morgen Witt
Contents
1. A Song of Colors
2. All the Worlds in the Hurricane
3. An Unforeseen Year
4. The Forsyth Institute
5. Every One an Alley Rat
6. A Brand-New Past
7. The Answer They Had
8. The Room of Future Present
9. The Ominous Shroud
10. A Flickering Fawkes
11. Disarming the Rat Trap
12. Goddess of Memory
13. A Remarkable Alley Sight
14. The Hoodie Ghost
15. The Squad and the Snobs
16. A Death in the Alleys
17. On the Trail of Ladies Unknown
18. Return of the Mysterious Interloper
19. A Vanishing in the Hall of Nobodies
20. Assault on the Vault
21. The Esoterica of Echo Phantasms
22. The Cruelty of Alley Pirates
23. The Hidden Threat
About the Author
Also by J.A. Enfield
For Magda, who worried about these kids.
Chapter 1
A Song of Colors
Mick’s shady spot was far enough from the family picnic that people didn’t try to drag him into their conversations but near enough that he could relax inside the safe sounds of his cousins yelling during soccer and his aunts and uncles having opinions about everything. Head propped on a foam football, he watched the clouds make and dissolve patterns against the blue sky. Between his bent knees, Lake Michigan shimmered blue and green to the horizon like a second sky. It looked like the air felt—heavy and alive. He’d played enough soccer for the day and eaten enough barbecue for a week, and the only thing left for him was to float in and out of daydreams while the grass tickled his neck. He loved his family, but they could be a lot sometimes, and half the time he needed to look after his baby sister Emilia. So it was nice to get a little time to himsel—
“Hey, Mick.”
Sigh.
Mick swiveled his eyes to see who it was. Tía Verónica. That was okay. She treated him like his brain worked.
“Hi, Tía.”
She sat down next to him, also staring out at the lake. “Wanted to be alone, huh?”
Mick shrugged.
“Too bad. I don’t get to see you as much now that you’re with Dan.”
Mick shrugged again, which seemed fair. Uncle Dan was basically a shrug in cargo shorts. Mick had moved from Tía Verónica’s to Uncle Dan’s a couple months earlier because she’d had to start taking longer hours at the hospital and Mick’s dad supposedly had been getting back to the U.S. soon. But his dad’s assignment kept getting extended, so Mick, Emilia, and Uncle Dan were stuck with one another for who knew how long. On their weekly video chats, Mick’s dad kept saying, “The assignment took a new direction, and they want me to stay on, but it shouldn’t be much longer.” But his dad had been saying it wouldn’t be much longer for so long that Mick could recite the line along with him. His dad had gotten mad on the last call because Mick had done just that.
“Dan’s okay,” Tía Verónica said.
Mick shrugged yet again.
She laughed. “I said ‘okay,’ not ‘magnificent.’”
Mick smiled a little. “Is Emilia all right over there?” he asked.
“Last I saw, she was in Julieta’s lap, hugging Swaggy Bear and smiling like crazy. She had those big eyes.”
Mick smiled. When Emilia was happy or just interested, her eyes would pop open and stay open. It was like she didn’t blink. And her teddy bear definitely made her happy. Tía Julieta was always bragging about how she’d made it the old-fashioned way—natural fibers, natural filling, all of her usual crunchy stuff. She’d even stitched “J” into one ear and “E” into the other. Mick thought if he’d made a bear with a lopsided head, too-close eyes, and barf-orange fur, he maybe wouldn’t have signed it. But Tía Julieta signed everything, from her paintings to the custom detailing she did on her wheelchair. Tía Verónica liked to say that if Tía Julieta ever robbed a bank, she would sign the vault before making her getaway.
“Your friend is named Aiden, right?” Tía Verónica asked.
“Sure.” Although Aiden wasn’t his friend anymore, not really. He hadn’t seen Aiden for months. Aiden hadn’t even come to the picnic. Mick didn’t hate Aiden or anything. They’d just lost touch because, after Mick’s mom died, Mick had needed to change schools—first when he went to live with Tía Julieta and then when he went to live with Tía Verónica. And now that he was living with Uncle Dan, he’d have to change schools again for fifth grade in the fall.
“His dad was gossiping with Gabriela about the assistant principal at your old school,” Tía Verónica said. “Your mom would’ve been all over that. Your mom pretended she didn’t like family picnics, but she did. Dorotea was nosy, and the whole point of picnics is to get into everybody’s business.” She sighed. “I still expect I’ll see her by the barbecue, you know? Asking people whether they really like their jobs or if they ever finished retiling their bathrooms.”
“Me too,” Mick said. That was another reason he liked Tía Verónica. She talked about his mom. His mom had died a few months after Emilia was born, and a lot of people didn’t talk about her anymore, including his dad. Of course, his dad had left home right after Emilia was born and right before his mom had gotten sick, but still. When Mick complained that nobody talked about his mom anymore, Tía Verónica said people probably didn’t want to make him sad. But what made him sad was that they acted like they’d forgotten her.
Like she was reading his mind, Tía Verónica said, “We do miss her, you know. All of us. Including your dad, even if he is being a pain in the butt.”
Mick laughed a little.
“I think he’s a little lost without her,” she said.
“Then he shouldn’t have left.”
“Maybe not. But it gets messy with adults sometimes. And I don’t really understand what happened between them, so I’m not going to shoot my mouth off.”
Mick didn’t understand what had happened either. His dad hadn’t been there to explain, and his mom had refused to talk about it. And then she’d gotten sick, so Mick had stopped asking. It was so frustrating not to have answers. Mick’s parents were both reporters, and they’d taught him to get answers. His mom had always said, “Find people who give you honest answers and belly laughs.” She’d loved to laugh. His dad had too, until he’d moved out. Now when Mick saw his dad on their Sunday calls, his dad no longer laughed or gave honest answers, not about important stuff, anyway.
Mick sighed.
“Still want to be alone?” Tía Verónica asked.
“It’s okay,” Mick said. “I just don’t feel like talking.”
Tía Verónica sat silently next to him and looked at Lake Michigan while he stared through slitted eyelids at the bright clouds drifting slowly across the bottomless sky.
After a while, she patted Mick on the shoulder and stood back up. “Hang in there, kiddo,” she said.
“I’ll try,” he said.
“Best any of us can do.”
Later that night, after Uncle Dan had finished watching cop shows and Mick had tried and failed to sleep a few times, Mick sat with his legs pulled to his chest in the big, ratty chair under the window, staring around the little bedroom he shared with Emilia.
It was dark inside and out, except for a sleepy streetlight smothered by thick August leaves and thick August air before being split by the bars outside the window and then filtered by the thin curtain. The room was a grab bag of grays, and it was hard to tell where Emilia ended and her blanket began.
It was quiet inside and out too, except for the old building’s squeaks and thunks and the occasional shushing sound of a car gliding past the first-floor apartment. The yelling that poured out of the bar up the street every night at closing time had gone silent, and the man upstairs was taking the night off from stomping back and forth while arguing with his furniture. The room was warm but not so warm that the ancient air conditioner in the other window had to clunk and wheeze against the Chicago summer. Sometimes Emilia gurgled and giggled in her sleep, one of Mick’s favorite sounds. Sometimes Uncle Dan, from the next room, snorted especially loudly in his sleep, not one of Mick’s favorite sounds.
But Mick knew those sounds—what they were, where they came from. In the pauses between those sounds, he realized that he was hearing something new. Probably. There was a murmur right at the border of hearing and imagination, a hum or a whisper. He closed his eyes and listened, trying to figure out where it was coming from. It disappeared under a series of snores from Uncle Dan and then again under the growl of a bad muffler.
But then it was back, louder. Even when the wind picked up, shaking the trees, he could hear it. It seemed to be a song, except there was no singing and he had no idea what the instruments were. Well, maybe “song” wasn’t exactly right. It was a humming that somehow wasn’t a sound, exactly. But it felt like a sound, something that
But the song wasn’t coming from outside. It was somehow coming from inside the room, where there was nothing except the drab shadows of sleeping furniture. Then Mick realized the shadows were getting fainter. The room was getting brighter, almost shimmering. At first he thought the wind was brushing aside the tree branches to expose the streetlight, but the shadows weren’t moving right for that. And, he realized, the shimmer was coming from inside the room. It was a bluish light, like somebody had turned on a tablet beneath a sheet.
Except his tablet was turned off.
The bluish light kept getting brighter, and now Mick could see where it was coming from: between Emilia’s crib and the bed that Mick had abandoned when he couldn’t fall asleep. It was hard to tell because the light had gotten brighter so gradually, but Mick thought the light might actually have slid through the outside wall. It did seem to be moving, just a little. Moving and growing. It was shimmering now, a mix of blues swirling like juices in a blender. And the song was louder, too. It was paired somehow with the light—the music changed when the light changed. Or maybe the other way around.
The room got bright enough and loud enough that Mick braced himself for Emilia to wake up crying. She was usually a quiet, cheerful kid, but too much light woke her up cranky and loud.
But Emilia just giggled happily from inside a dream, moving her hand a little as if reaching for Swaggy Bear, which was out of reach near the foot of the crib.
The shimmer had gotten big enough that Emilia was now inside it. It was beautiful, and it didn’t seem to bother her. But he was pretty sure that you weren’t supposed to just leave babies inside mysterious lights that wandered in off the street. He should move her. But moving her probably would wake her up. And then she’d cry, and Uncle Dan would yell, “Some of us need to work in the morning.”
Besides, a shimmer that glorious couldn’t be dangerous, especially not with such a beautiful song playing inside it. Well, not inside—through? The shimmer was round, like a globe, only way bigger. Inside, it was a shifting, swirling, flickering bundle of blues encircled by stainless steel rings. It looked like the planets he discovered when piloting imaginary starships, like a ball made out of joy plasma that he could bounce off the floor and grab again on the rebound, grab and hold tight and forget about starships because it would soar into the heavens under its own power, with him dangling weightlessly beneath it, the solar wind in his hair, the constellations between his toes, and the song that wasn’t a song pulsing through his quivering bones.
The scratchy blanket slid off Mick as he stood to stare at the shimmer. It was almost within reach.
Mick had the uncanny feeling it was staring at him.
He took a step, half raising his arm. The shimmer spun a little, parts of it turning smooth and still and dark like a pupil. From top to bottom, its different colors became the same dark blue just for a moment. Then, from bottom to top, it started to shimmer again.
Had it just winked at him?
He felt an almost overwhelming urge to finish raising his hand and touch the shimmer. Or leap into it. It was so beautiful.
But a little part of his brain thought of the fishing lures his mom had taught him to use when they went camping. Beautiful songs made out of humming colors that suckered fish out of the water and into somebody’s frying pan.
He made himself lower his hand and step slowly around the shimmer, edging closer to his sleeping sister. He got his feet set and rehearsed the next steps in his mind: lean over a bit to get his shoulders past the top of the crib, plunge his hands down, and then lift her out. Maybe he wouldn’t even wake her up.
He took a few deep breaths and reached into the shimmer. But his hands weren’t moving toward Emilia because they weren’t moving at all. He strained to reach Emilia only to realize there was no crib, no Emilia.
He realized that he was inside the shimmer and its song.
Inside a strange world that didn’t allow things to happen—no reaching, no moving. As if the air were crystal.
Only his mind was moving. I told you so, it said. Fishing lure.
And then there was movement without sound. The air became a hundred quiet hurricanes, each whirling and hurling a different part of him in a different direction. His silent screams and sick stomach spread out around him, across the whole world, across every world, until in all directions the distant air was nothing but stars, and then nothing but darkness.
Chapter 2
All the Worlds in the Hurricane
Mick thought he might be dying. Or dead.
But he was pretty sure you were supposed to go into a light when you died, and there was no light. The world was dark and nowhere in particular, and so was he. When he wiggled his fingers, he could see what he thought might be movement more or less where he thought his fingers should be, little shadow puppets without a light to cast shadows or a wall to cast them on. There wasn’t any floor, either. He seemed to be floating. He was pretty sure he was spinning slowly as he went, long, lazy cartwheels, but he couldn’t have said why he thought so. He didn’t know where up and down were, or if there even was an up or a down. And every time he felt like he might have an idea, things shifted somehow. He might be spinning in the opposite direction. Or he’d feel like he’d gotten shorter or taller, and the hint of his hand would wave at him from closer or farther away than the end of his arm. Sometimes he had to pat himself to be sure that he was still there. Wherever “there” was.
As he floated, he started developing weird notions. That he was being tugged slowly along by an unseen hook attached to his spine, like the glowing sphere really had been a fishing lure. That he was trapped between two sides of a piece of paper. That he was floating through other people’s dreams. That he was watching himself go by in the other direction, floating next to his mom. That he’d grown a third kneecap.
He was trying to pat his legs to check about the extra kneecap when all of sudden he was very sure that he only had two kneecaps, which were at once very cold and fiery with pain. And now he knew which way was down because he’d fallen very thoroughly down and bashed his knees into a ground that very definitely existed.
More specifically, when he opened his eyes, he noticed he’d fallen knees-first onto a thick tree root dusted with snow. He craned his neck back and found himself far below the shaggy branches of a great pine tree laddering endlessly upward. The scent of vanilla filled his nostrils. He breathed in as deeply as he could, savoring the scent while the agony in his knees slowly turned from frozen knives and hot pokers into a round, calm throbbing that hardly made him want to cry at all.
A rustle behind him turned out to be a huge buck standing nearby. Not so close he could touch it, but not much farther. The buck had fierce, flaring nostrils, outrageous antlers, and a faintly orange coat with complicated undertones that almost shimmered in the cold sun.
No, not almost—they were shimmering. And getting brighter. And then there was the shimmer-song, alive under his skin and in his mind, calling him. Without thinking, he leaned forward a little. And then he was inside the shimmering.
It happened again. The locked silence. The hurricanes. The floating, the spinning, the shadow puppet hands in a dark, formless world. The singing that wasn’t singing. The fish lure tugging his spine, a dim glimpse of himself and his mother fading into the distance. The sensations weren’t quite as forceful, but they were still overwhelming, still confusing.
