Predestination Unknown Read online

  I should get inside somewhere, definitely, but really, where the fuck was I? The stars, the quiet—they all spoke of a place more than three miles from the Salem I’d left, and how was it even possible to move three miles by falling through a broken mirror in the first place?

  “I need to call my friends.” I took my phone out of my pocket, but there was still no signal at all. Ezekiel gave it a questioning glance as I slid it back into my pocket. “I need to get somewhere with a signal. Salem.”

  “You have a way to signal your friends?” It was like he didn't understand how phones worked.

  “My friends are in Salem,” I said, sticking with the concrete.

  “You'll not make it to Salem tonight without a horse or a coat. Bed with us this evening and in the morning, mayhap, someone will be heading into Salem.”

  Was that a come-on? And who was us? There was no sign of anyone, anywhere. The dirt road rose over a small hill to my left and took a dip to the right, but between hill and dip, there wasn't a person or a building.

  “I'll not turn you in, if that's what you fear,” Ezekiel said when I didn't respond to his invitation.

  “Turn me in?”

  “If you're perhaps on the run, I'd not give you over. There are some who hold with slavery, but I'm not one of them.”

  What the actual—? What?

  “Slavery?” I repeated, because the entire sentence boggled my mind.

  “You're not an escaped slave then?”

  “What the—? No.” If this was a fucking acting piece, I was beyond insulted by it. Slavery might have been a thing in the Colonial days, but playing at it now was not funny.

  “Good. I'm glad of it. But I make the same offer. Weather the night with us.” He was so fucking sincere. It didn't even read like an act. It was … he must be, like, Amish or something.

  That was it. The clothes that were too heavy and detailed for a costume, the funny speech, the lack of understanding of how cell phones worked, the horse, the barn. It all snapped into place. I hadn't even known there were Amish in this part of Massachusetts, never mind that there were pockets of them so far out of touch they didn't know what a cell phone was.

  And the slavery thing? Had they really not read a newspaper since 1860?

  I was lucky Ezekiel was one of the Amish who didn't “hold” with slavery, or I might have found myself in leg irons waiting to be returned to my “master.” This was a fucking ridiculous way to end what had already been an annoying trip. And to have to spend the night in the middle of fucking nowhere with no phone signal and a guy who said mayhap, who was almost definitely not going to sleep with me? It sucked.

  No one would even be looking for me, considering I’d told Janelle not to. They’d assume I’d gotten a whole lot luckier than I had.

  I looked down the road in the direction Ezekiel had indicated Salem lay. I rubbed my hands over my arms and considered my options.

  Nope. Not going to die over one night in Amish country.

  “That would be great,” I told him. “I'd appreciate the place to stay.”

  “My horse is around this way.” He headed towards the side of the barn and I followed at his heels.

  “Horse? I thought we were close.”

  “Not so far,” Ezekiel said. “But not so close to walk if we needn't.”

  OK, I had never actually been on a horse, not unless you counted going around in a circle on a pony ride once when I was eight. That was what came of growing up in a Connecticut suburb—not a lot of horse-riding opportunities. Horses weren’t scary, exactly, but they were kind of intimidating. Ezekiel's was dark-haired and quiet and seemed pretty tame, but it was sure a lot taller than that pony.

  Ezekiel unwrapped the horse’s reins from a metal cleat on the side of the barn, then put a foot in the stirrup and threw his leg easily over the horse's body like a gymnast vaulting a … yeah, that was probably why they called that apparatus a horse, actually.

  He reached down, offering me his hand.

  “Um.”

  “Is the injury to your hand too severe? You might mount from the other side, were that less bothersome.”

  “No, it's not my hand.” It was that mounting part. The only mounting I did was on an entirely different kind of beast and had a lot to do with how I’d landed myself in this mess. “I've never been on a horse,” I confessed.

  “What? Never?” He gave me the same look he'd given my cell phone earlier. Did these Amish folks really not get that the rest of the world didn't live their backwards ways?

  “You need only take my hand,” he said, holding it out again. “Step on my foot and I shall do the rest.”

  I did as I was told, though I felt bad about stepping on Ezekiel's foot. I was a solid guy, not overweight but running close to two hundred most days. It couldn't feel good to have my entire weight riding on your foot. But I grabbed his hand and stepped up and responded to the yank he gave me by yanking back just as hard and somehow I was up higher than I’d expected to be faster than I could overthink it. Ezekiel might be lean, but he had Amish farm muscles, apparently, because he had no trouble hauling my two hundred pounds off the ground.

  I grabbed clumsily at his shoulder with my other hand and swung my leg over the back of the horse. I didn't quite clear it on my first try—there was a collision of knee and horse flesh that made the horse nicker angrily—but I eventually got myself settled on top of the beast with my chest pressed tight against Ezekiel's back. I tried to scoot myself away from his body and failed.

  “Saddle's not really meant for two,” I complained when I slid against him again.

  “Not far to go.” He did something with the reins that made the horse head for the road. Every step shifted us and every shift brought my hips in closer contact with his butt. Aaaand now my mind was back on the possibility of getting laid which wasn't at all a helpful thing to be thinking about. If Ezekiel was Amish, he was most definitely not gay. Or at least he wasn't gay and out and up for a hookup with a stranger.

  “Are you Amish?” I asked, mostly to distract myself.

  “Amish? What is Amish?”

  “Mennonite?” I tried. And when that didn't provoke a response, I added, “You look like a Puritan,” as a joke.

  “Ah, yes. The Godly we call ourselves, or Congregationalists, but I've heard the term Puritan.”

  The Godly. Nice. Way to condemn the whole rest of the world to hell. And as for Congregationalists, I’d met plenty of them back in Connecticut and none of them were wearing knee breeches. Whatever cult I’d fallen in with, they were evidently even more isolated and bizarre than I’d first realized.

  “And you, Mr. Johnson? You're a Christian, I hope, that I'm bringing home to my father.”

  “I’m Baptist.” That was the church my grandmother had dragged me to, not that I’d been near a church since I’d gotten old enough to dig my heels in and say no, but I didn't need Ezekiel to change his mind about giving me a place to sleep and maybe a ride into Salem tomorrow.

  Ezekiel nodded, the motion of the horse causing our heads to bump against each other, so apparently Baptist was an acceptable answer, and now I knew who “we” was. There was undoubtedly a whole family of suspendered fathers and frocked mothers surrounded by their band of Dickensian children awaiting us at the end of our horse ride.

  I concentrated on the possibility of there being a Mrs. Ezekiel too, because the rocking motion of my groin against Ezekiel’s ass was making wrong things happen—things that his possible wife would not appreciate and that probably Ezekiel himself wasn't appreciating.

  I was going to find myself dumped onto the ground facing a pitchfork if I didn’t get my dick under control, but fuck. His ass rolled against my groin with every step and I had to hold onto him somewhere if I didn’t want to fall right off. I’d tried grabbing him by the shoulders, around the chest, across his hips. All his body parts felt damn fine—lean and hard—but how good they felt wasn’t helping any.

  He smelled good too—like w
ool and sweat, like he'd been working all day and hadn't showered yet. I shouldn’t like it as much as I did. I was used to men who smelled like cologne or soap—clean and commercial—but there was something both comforting and arousing about a guy who smelled like a guy.

  I tried again to shift my groin away from his ass, but the saddle acted like a cradle. Anything I did to create distance only generated friction. I definitely had a growing problem, which was ridiculous because I had a hundred problems and a boner shouldn’t have been one of them.

  “It’s a natural reaction to the motion,” Ezekiel said, breaking the silence that had stretched between us with that bombshell of a comment. “There be no harm to it.”

  Oh, God. He’d noticed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll not mind it.”

  Damn, I knew I hadn’t been wrong about the way he’d been eying me in the maze. If Ezekiel was digging me getting off against him, I might as well enjoy a little horseback snuggle with his warm body. He was quiet and so was the star-filled night around us. If I weren’t totally fucked, it’d be kind of romantic, but I couldn’t ignore the questions plaguing me.

  The thing about Ezekiel being Amish—or not Amish, but whatever religious sect he was from—was that it answered some questions, like why he didn’t recognize a cell phone when he saw one, but it didn’t answer the question of where I was or how I’d gotten there.

  Even if I accepted being instantly transported three miles from Salem, those three miles didn’t explain how many stars were in the sky or how few buildings lined the road. They didn’t explain why there wasn’t even a road, just this dirt track, or why I didn’t have a signal when I’d had four bars before I’d fallen through that mirror. On the ride up this morning, I’d had reception the whole way, and, yeah, there’d been farms in the area, but there’d been buildings too. Cars. People. Civilization. Three miles didn’t even begin to explain how far away I felt.

  And there was no explanation for how I’d moved three miles anyway, not if I’d been conscious the whole time, which I thought I had. The only explanation was that I hadn’t—that I’d been rendered unconscious by the force of breaking through the mirror and then moved while I was unconscious. But by whom? And why? Not theft. I had my phone and although I hadn’t checked out the contents of my wallet, I could feel it pressing against my leg in the pocket opposite my phone. It was a stretch to think someone had opened it, removed the contents, carefully put it back, and then moved me from the scene of the crime. None of it made any sense at all.

  Unless …

  Unless I’d moved more in time than in space. Unless Ezekiel talked and dressed like a Puritan because he was really a Puritan and the sky was full of stars because there was no light pollution from all the buildings that weren’t there because they hadn’t been built yet. And the rain had stopped because it was no longer Halloween in the year 2017 but was, in fact, some completely different day, a day when it hadn’t rained in long enough that Ezekiel’s horse clomped with audible footfalls on the dry dirt road.

  And was that …? Yes, that was snow I saw in patches out in the fields we passed. There’d been no snow in the Salem I’d left, but here, now—wherever here and now was—snow had fallen and not all of it had melted.

  I pressed tighter against Ezekiel’s back with the sudden awareness of just how cold it was. When he didn’t stop me, I tucked my nose right into his neck and he laughed.

  “Cold enough then,” he said. “You’d not have lasted out here the night.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Thank you for picking me up. I’m sorry I was in your barn.”

  “You never said why.”

  “I don’t exactly know. I hurt myself and got … confused, I guess. I’m not sure how I got there.”

  “Not running from anyone though?” His voice was cautiously suspicious. No doubt he worried what he was bringing home to his family.

  “No one’s looking for me,” I said, which was true enough for tonight. When my friends missed me tomorrow morning, would they think to go back to the mirror maze? And if they did, what would they find? A broken mirror? The passage through to wherever I’d landed? Or nothing at all?

  “We’re almost there,” Ezekiel said reassuringly when I shuddered. He touched my hands where they were clasped together around his waist and I wondered why his hand felt so warm. I ducked my head, tucking it in tighter against his neck, completely lost and almost alone.

  Chapter 3

  Just when I’d begun to wonder if we were headed all the way into Salem after all, a light appeared at the bottom of the hill we’d just crested. The light became a window and the dark mass around it became a house. The house was two stories tall—more than a simple bungalow or shack. I’d been wondering what I was in for, but the yellow light streaming out of the windows welcomed.

  Ezekiel guided the horse to a barn behind the house. “Can you get yourself down, do you think?”

  “Has to be easier than getting up.” I balanced one hand on his shoulder and one on the horse’s rump and did something halfway between a dismount and a collapse, relieved when my feet touched solid ground again. I hadn’t felt unsafe on the horse—Ezekiel was too comfortable handling him for that—but the ground was where I belonged.

  Ezekiel sprang lightly off the horse and I watched while he lit a lamp, then drew some water from a pump. The horse drank deeply while Ezekiel rubbed him down with a brush.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  “Her name’s Daffy. She’s a good old girl.”

  “Daffy?” I could only think of the duck, but—Puritan or Amish—Ezekiel wouldn’t know about that.

  “Short for Daffodil.”

  I eyed the giant animal with the dark brown coat and tired eyes skeptically.

  “She aren’t much of a flower,” Ezekiel said, agreeing with my unspoken assessment. “’Tis why we call her Daffy. I were only a child when I named her and she’s been mine since.”

  “How old are you now?”

  By lamplight, I could see his features more clearly. His innocence shone through delicate features centered around a too-sharp nose.

  “Not a child. Twenty-two come August.”

  “Not so old.”

  “And how old might you be?”

  “Twenty-four.” Twenty-four plus a few hundred years, give or take. If it wasn’t 2017 anymore, then when exactly was it? Before I could figure out how to ask that question so that I didn’t sound as delusional as I feared I was, Ezekiel straightened away from Daffy.

  “Come on inside and I’ll introduce you to my folks.” He picked up the lamp he’d left swinging from a nail and led the way across a patch of snow-splotched grass towards the house. The ground here was soggy under my feet. Dampness soaked into my shoes—a pair of buckle-topped loafers I’d borrowed from my father because they looked vaguely like they could belong to a member of the French guard in the seventeenth century, but which were completely inappropriate for snow or mud.

  Thoughts of my father’s shoes triggered an image of the police coming to his door to tell him I was missing. I had to get back before that happened.

  “They’ll have the fire going inside,” Ezekiel said when I shuddered. Only his warm body had been keeping me from freezing on the ride over and the fifteen minutes we’d spent apart since then had leeched the warmth of our contact out of me. The next time I disapparated into the middle of nowhere/nowhen, I was going to come better dressed. What I wouldn’t give for my heavy crew-neck North Face fleece and some Under Armor, topped with my Patriots parka and a nice wool beanie.

  Fortunately, it was less than fifty feet between the barn and the house. Ezekiel pushed open a door and ushered me into a well-lit and much warmer room. One end of the great room was dominated by a large fireplace, the other by an equally large metal contraption that looked almost like the front end of a train but which I worked out was probably a stove. Between the two smoking beasts sat a large wooden table and around the table were a num
ber of surprised-looking white folks.

  “You’re late to supper,” one of the women said as she rose. Based on her spot at the foot of the table, she must be the woman of the house, though she didn’t look old enough to be Ezekiel’s mother nor drained enough to be the mother of so many children. She wore a dress that went all the way to the ground with an apron over it and an honest-to-God white bonnet like she was on Little House on the Prairie.

  “You’ve brought a guest,” said the man at the other end of the table, turning in his chair so that he faced us. This guy was old enough to be Ezekiel’s father and then some. He had white whiskers and white hair down to his collar and he was dressed a lot like Ezekiel except without the felt hat and cloak, which Ezekiel shed. A younger women scurried to take them from him.

  “This is Luther Johnson,” Ezekiel said, his tone more formal with his own father than it had been with me. “He’s found himself separated from his friends and in need of shelter for the evening. My father,” Ezekiel said to me, by way of finishing the introduction, “the senior Ezekiel Cheever.”

  “Sir,” I said, because that seemed like the right way to greet an old dude sporting mutton chops and a frock coat. Should I go over and shake his hand? Ezekiel Senior wasn’t exactly smiling at me.

  “You’ve brought home a negro?”

  “The Bible tells us to love the stranger, for were we not strangers ourselves in Egypt?”

  “Don’t quote scripture at me, Ezekiel. I offered to send you to divinity school with your brother and you wouldn’t have it.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “I’m well aware of our Christian duty. You can bring him out a plate to the barn.”