The Chaos Loop Read online

  “I won’t get addicted. I’m different.”

  The screech of tires made him stop in his tracks.

  And a loud, unearthly scream.

  By the time Corey spun around to see what happened, Walter Preston was crouched on the road. A set of black tire tracks led past him to an Uber cab, stopped at a slant halfway onto the grass.

  “Oh, Panayia . . .” Papou muttered. He gathered his thumb and first two fingers into the Greek sign of the cross as he stepped closer—touching forehead, chest, right shoulder, heart.

  Corey ran closer. Walter was shuddering, sobbing. The Uber driver had left his car and was running back toward the scene, his face creased with dismay. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. He just ran into the road. . . .”

  As Walter stood, numb, other cars veered carefully around him. That was when Corey caught a glimpse of the inert figure on the road.

  The beautiful Lab who had once been Bailey.

  3

  “Heyyy . . . Baileyyyy, what’s u-u-u-up?” Corey shouted, racing up the stoop of the Prestons’ brownstone. He was moving so fast, the dog almost jumped back through the front door.

  The not-yet-dead dog. Because Corey was no longer in the present.

  Calm down, he told himself. He willed his heart to stop banging in his chest. He had timed this one exactly right. This was a true microhop.

  Ten minutes into the past. Time enough to save Bailey’s life.

  He still wasn’t sure how he was able to do this. Somehow it worked through a metal artifact. A belt buckle from 1862, a subway token from 2001, the silver content of a photo from 1917—those were his first trips. But now he was able to slip hours and minutes, with nothing but coins from the present time. How?

  It’s like asking a control pitcher how to hit the corners of the strike zone, Papou had told him. They just concentrate on doing it, and they do it.

  Sometimes it was best not to analyze.

  “Oh, hi, Corey,” said Walter Preston, closing the door behind him. “We’re running late. Man, glad your sister’s okay. I want to talk to you about what happened. Walk us to the park? Bailey really has to go—”

  But Corey squatted at the landing by the front door, not letting Bailey get down the stoop, hugging him and scratching his belly. “I am so, so, so, so sorry I ran past you near the subway, big guy—you know I love you!”

  Bailey whimpered and squirmed, his eyes darting nervously to the sidewalk. But Corey knew exactly where to scratch him and how much he liked it, and he soon gave in, licking Corey’s face.

  “Come on, Bails,” Walter said. “Let’s get you to the park before you pee on Corey.” He gathered Bailey’s leash, but Corey held tight.

  Out of the corner of his eye, a half a block farther down Ninety-Fifth Street, Corey spotted the door to his brownstone opening. Through the front door walked Papou and . . . Corey.

  Himself.

  His body shivered, head to toe. Bailey hadn’t yet seen the other Corey and neither had Walter. This was good. Seeing two Coreys would freak Walter out. Corey angled Bailey the opposite direction, toward Columbus Avenue, forcing Walter to turn his back to the Fletchers’ brownstone.

  Corey’s body tingled. He felt weirdly cold. Was this a sign of ELSTTS? Like magnets repelling, Papou had said.

  He blocked all that out. Bailey was whimpering like crazy, dying to get to the park. But Corey didn’t care. He would take a blast of pee, full in the chest, to keep Bailey from harm.

  Finally, with a painful, high-pitched yowl, Bailey jumped loose and leaped down the steps. “No-o-o-o!” Corey shouted.

  The dog stopped at the curb, lifting his leg against a scraggly tree with a sign that read Please Do Not Let Your Dog Urinate Here.

  “Awwwww, Bails, what are you doing?” Walter burst out laughing.

  “Sorry,” Corey said, trying to hide his feeling of relief.

  “The irony is, I put that sign there,” Walter said with a shrug. “Ah well, best-laid plans . . .”

  As they waited for Bailey to do his business, Corey gave a sidelong glance up the block. His other Corey-self and Papou were disappearing around the corner of Central Park West. Slowly he stood. The delay had worked. Now he had to get out of sight, back to the time he’d just left.

  “Well, I guess I better . . . um, do my homework,” Corey announced.

  Accompanying Walter and Bailey up 95th Street, he kept a deliberately slow pace. He said good-bye to them in front of his own building and watched intently as Walter and Bailey continued toward Central Park West.

  He spotted the Uber speeding up the avenue. It would get to the intersection way before Walter. It would turn into the park without coming near Bailey.

  Corey exhaled deeply. Time to return to the present. He reached into his pocket, grabbed a fistful of very warm coins, and closed his eyes.

  His head felt like it would explode. He gulped air. His heart raced. For sure he had learned to pinpoint his trips better, but they still hurt. He blinked once, twice, until the familiar corner scene reappeared.

  He was at the Gate of All Saints. The exact spot he’d left, where the cab had hit Bailey. He was the one and only Corey again, back in his “present” body. He was shoulder to shoulder with Papou, just as he’d been before the time hop. No one seemed to have noticed anything weird had happened.

  Where was Bailey?

  He stopped and spun around. His grandfather continued walking toward the tennis courts, lost in his own thoughts.

  There. The Uber cab had driven past Corey. It was now disappearing between the stone walls of the transverse road, heading toward the East Side. Corey’s eyes swept left, back toward the park entrance, then back over the wall. He scanned the area from 96th to 95th Street. There was Walter, visible over the park wall from the waist up. He was walking slowly up Central Park West, yanking on Bailey’s leash. He hadn’t reached the park yet.

  He’d been delayed by Corey. And now everybody was safe and happy.

  Corey wanted to whoop with joy. But it would weird out Walter to see him here. After all, Walter had just said good-bye to Corey back on 95th Street.

  So instead Corey pumped his fist silently and ran after Papou. The old man had reached the park’s West Drive and was waiting while bike traffic cleared. Corey pulled him across the drive and onto a tree-lined path. “I saved a life, Papou,” he blurted out.

  “You what?” Papou stopped, glaring at Corey.

  “Don’t get mad at me. It was Bailey. He died. He was run over. You saw it. I saw it. So I went back and brought him back to life!”

  “Just now? While we were walking?” Papou said.

  “It was so . . . easy,” Corey said. “Is that normal? I mean, it didn’t used to be easy. When I tried to save Yiayia, I messed up everything. And now, all I do is hold the coins. They get warm, I think about what time I want to go to, and bam! It’s like I went straight from crawling to tap dancing! I wanted to go back ten minutes, and I hit it. Ten exactly. Is it that easy for you?”

  “No.” Papou’s face was creased with concern. “But I’m not a Throwback. I gave up time traveling long ago—”

  “I know, I know, you’re going to yell at me.”

  “Not yell, paithaki, but this just proves my point about getting addicted to traveling in time—”

  “I couldn’t just let Bailey die! You told me I had to be responsible.”

  “There are unintended consequences of changing the past. You know this!”

  “Right. That’s what you say. That’s what books and movies say. The butterfly effect. If you step on a butterfly in the past, the future falls apart. Chains and chains of events. When you come back to the present, Nazis are in power . . . or whatever,” Corey said. “But so far all I’ve done is make good things happen. So isn’t it responsible to do good things? To save lives? You were so sad before I saved Yiayia on 9/11. My whole life, I knew you were sad. You even looked different. Skinny, hunched over. Everything about you was different. But wh
en I came back, it all shifted. You never lost her. You never knew that awful feeling!”

  “I will of course always be grateful, Corey,” Papou said. “I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if she weren’t here. But with all respect, you didn’t save her. Not directly. What happened was a mistake, am I right? Something you did in nineteen seventeen—”

  “Changed one small thing, I know—”

  “Which accidentally saved her life many years later.”

  “But think about it—if that’s what I did by accident, what about the stuff I can do on purpose?” Corey asked. “I’m better at it now. I can pinpoint my time hops almost to the minute. I saved a life, Papou. You should have seen Walter’s face when Bailey was killed.”

  “I can only imagine.”

  “I don’t know how I improved. Practice, I guess.”

  “Practice.” Papou nodded. “Yes, the more you do it, the better you get. And the more eager to continue.”

  Silently he began walking north along the old bridle path. He seemed deep in thought, and Corey kept quiet. They climbed a gentle hill that bridged the transverse road. Below them, cars whizzed east and west. On the other side of the bridge, as they descended toward the North Meadow baseball fields, the old man finally spoke again.

  “When I was a boy, I read Superman comics,” he said. “Your great-grandparents wanted me to read the classics! But to me, comics were like the Greek myths—battles for the soul of humanity, good versus evil, the interplay between superpowers and mortals. Oh, I wanted superpowers to be real. I had a big fantasy life like you do. But I knew it was fantasy—until I began time-hopping. At first I didn’t believe I was doing it. I thought it was my imagination. I began to think I was seriously mentally ill. It scared me, paithi mou. I didn’t have anyone like me to explain it.”

  “But . . . but you must have inherited the ability from someone in the family, right?” Corey asked.

  “Yes . . .” Papou looked out over the ball fields, but his eyes were somewhere else. “One night I had what I thought was a dream. I found myself on a dirt road in a small town in Greece. The full moon was the only light. I heard a high, painful shrieking. It came from a building in a field. It was painted completely white. There were bars on the window. A guard with a wooden club sat in front, but he was slumped on a chair, fast asleep. At first I thought it was some kind of prison. But the shrieking was mixed with cackling, laughing, nonsense words. And I knew what this building really was—an asylum. I crept closer, until a face suddenly appeared in the window. It was an old lady. She had no teeth. Her hair was like loose wires! I jumped. But she just smiled like she was expecting me. And she said, ‘O Kostas, o levendis! Ella tha filaki to yiayia.’”

  “What does that mean?” Corey asked.

  “‘Kostas, the brave one! Come kiss your grandmother.’”

  Corey stopped short, and Papou turned to face him.

  “Here’s the thing, Corey,” the old man continued. “I had heard about her. My family called her trellos—crazy. When they spoke of her, they invoked the evil eye.” He raised his gnarled index and middle fingers into a V-sign and pantomimed spitting through them. “Ptoo . . . ptoo . . . ptoo . . . always three times. I didn’t know what to think. Was I crazy, too? If I admitted what I saw, would they laugh at me? Lock me up? So I said nothing. I retreated into stories, comics. Then I read one episode I never forgot. Superman makes the world rotate in the opposite direction. Why? To reverse time, so he can change a terrible tragedy in the past. This makes no sense, I know. But I began thinking. About superpowers. Maybe I did have one, and it was time travel. Hers, too! Maybe my yiayia and I were not crazy! I vowed to be like Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, people trying to live a normal life while hiding a secret.”

  “Then I came along,” Corey said.

  “That’s when I learned something new,” Papou said. “What we do, all of us Knickerbockers, is not power. We go, observe, come back, that’s all. We’re like tourists in time. We can’t change anything, no matter how hard we try. That’s why people get addicted, like Smig. Like Leila’s aunt Flora. You want to save a person. It should be so easy to do! But you fail and fail and fail. The frustration catches hold of you, the idea that if you try one more time . . . then you might succeed. You eventually give up. But that doesn’t stop you. You keep going back anyway, for another reason—because it’s the only way to be with that loved one. You go again and again. Chances are good that you may meet yourself. You may meet many versions of yourself. And that is when you run into trouble. Eventually your body will punish you. Your genes somehow know that you shouldn’t exist twice. They will force you to transspeciate. To become a creature that is as far from human as can be. Something hideous. And that is what concerns me.”

  “Papou, think about it,” Corey said. “People keep going back because they fail to change things. Like you just said. But that’s not me. I can succeed! So I won’t need to keep going back, right? Which means I won’t get addicted. And I won’t transspeciate.”

  “I know human nature. You’re a good boy, but success will make you bold. When you change one thing, you will want to change another. And another.”

  Corey fell silent. They were nearing the North Woods now. The trees were losing their color and gathering the darkness. “Just out of curiosity, Papou—how many time hops does it take to, you know . . . turn into a beast?”

  Papou shrugged and took Corey’s arm. “This, my boy,” he said, “is why we’re here. To find out.”

  4

  Corey could smell Smig before seeing him. “Ucccch. Why would anybody come down here, ever?” he whispered.

  “Usually he hides where no one can smell him,” Papou explained. “But when he senses we’re coming, he comes out of his cave.”

  “Lucky us.”

  They descended the path that led to a stream just below a waterfall. As they reached bottom, Corey heard a frantic rustling in the bushes.

  “Smig?” Papou called out.

  A scream broke the silence, followed by a low-pitched chuffing. A flash of white dashed through the underbrush from right to left, and Papou stopped in his tracks.

  “That’s not Smig,” Corey said.

  “Hello!” Papou shouted. “Who’s down there?”

  The white creature was out of sight. But now something was moving to the right, from the place where the white-furred creature had run. Under the waterfall, from the mouth of a small cave came a different animal, thick and grayish brown. Despite the darkness Corey could still make out two tusks, a ridge of spiked hair, and bloodshot eyes that seemed to glow with their own yellow light.

  That was Smig.

  “No one here but us chickens,” came a husky, raw growl that was more grunt than voice. “I mean, chicken. Just me. I’m alone. Completely alone, minding my own business.” He began making a weird, spitty, blowing noise.

  “What are you doing?” Papou asked.

  “Whistling an innocent tune,” Smig said.

  But Corey’s eyes were trained on the bushes to his left, where he could see the white animal hiding. He had a suspicion what it was. Well, who it was. Flora was the time-traveling aunt of Corey’s time-traveling best friend, Leila. Like Smig, Auntie Flora had time traveled too much for her DNA to withstand. She’d transspeciated into a creature that looked like a bright white cat on steroids, with a stout body like a badger and a snout like a dog. As a person, she’d been a Knickerbocker like Papou. Nowadays, she lurked around the Upper West Side, and the local kids had given her a different name.

  Is that . . . Catsquatch? Papou mouthed.

  Corey nodded.

  What is she doing with Smig? Papou asked.

  Corey shrugged. Picking up a branch, he crept closer and poked at the area. “Peekaboo . . .”

  The white lump jumped. With a menacing sssssss! the creature known as Catsquatch leaped into sight, baring her teeth.

  “Hello, Flora. We didn’t expect to see you here,” Papou said. He raised his eyebrows at
Smig. “I hope we didn’t . . . interrupt anything.”

  “Er, hrmmmmph, I can explain,” Smig grumbled. “We are merely . . . colleagues, commiserating over our forlorn loves—er, lives!”

  Papou sniffed. “Do I detect romance in the air?”

  “That,” Corey drawled, “is so disgusting.”

  “Ro—rom—? No, no, no, no, no!” Smig snuffled. “Don’t be silly.”

  “Silly?” Now Catsquatch reared back on her haunches, glaring at Smig. “Do I embawwas you, Cosmo?”

  Corey tried not to smile. Something about her animal jaw made it impossible for Auntie Flora, aka Catsquatch, to pronounced her r’s. But it was important to be wespectful.

  Respectful.

  “Of course not, my dear!” Smig retorted. “It’s merely a matter of . . . propriety.”

  If Smig weren’t covered with thick bristles, Corey could swear he was blushing.

  “What you love beasts do down here is none of our business,” Papou said. “I’ve brought along Corey to discuss his future. To encourage him to take proper precautions. He has already time-hopped five times.”

  “Well . . .” Corey murmured. “More like seventeen.”

  “Sevent—?” Papou’s eyes widened. “The Civil War soldier, the World Trade Center attack, New York in 1917, your sister on the subway, Bailey . . .”

  “Remember when I got that perfect score on my chemistry project?” Corey said. “And the time I told you to sell your Archer Street Corporation stock—”

  “Ach, Panayia mou!” Papou quickly looked up to the heavens, then turned to Smig and Catsquatch. “You see? Talk some sense into my grandson, you two.”

  Catsquatch walked straight to Corey and stood on her hind legs again, placing her front paws on his shins. “My advice? Don’t do it. I will not stand by and let my niece’s boyfwiend become one of us!”

  “I’m not her boyfriend,” Corey murmured, feeling his face grow warm.

  “Indeed, Flora, well said! Brava! You don’t want this fate!” Smig snorted. A pungent aroma rose up from behind him, as if to emphasize the point.