Read Online Ancient Fire by Mark London Williams - Free Book Online Page A

gives me the
smile again, like she has warm cookies for me, but of course she
doesn’t.
    “That’s your name?”
    She points to my baseball cards. “That was
Griffey’s number. It’ll be my name for today.” Two men in dark blue
suits step out of the train car, and the shadows, to stand next to
her. “And we’ll call these two Twenty-Five.”
    I look back at the cards: Both Bonds and
McGwire wore number twenty-five. I consider asking Mr. Howe
something, and decide it’d be useless. Instead, I say to Number
Thirty, “Don’t tell me you people brought me this far for some kind
of Barnstormer game.”
    “Me and the two Twenty-Fives, here. We’re the
Referees.”
    “Baseball has umpires.”
    “Well, we’re known here as Referees. We kind
of do what the Supreme Court does. Except they make public
decisions.”
    She lets that hang there.
    “And you make secret ones?”
    “Private ones. For DARPA, and other agencies.
When things happen that there aren’t any rules for yet. We help
make up those rules.”
    “But then who gets to know what they
are?”
    She doesn’t answer, turning to Mr. Howe
instead. “You’re right. He is a smart boy.” Then she leans in close
to me. “Come on, Eli Sands. Let’s find out what we should do with
you. And whether there’s any chance of getting your mother
back.”
    She turns and walks toward the Plexiglas
office, with the Twenty-Fives in tow. She’s whistling a little
song—from a Disney movie, I think, but I’ve been too old for those
since at least 2015. It’s an ancient one, about being happy while
you work. I wonder how much she really cares about my mom.
    Soon, I’m in a soft, fancy chair—like the
kind you might find on an airplane—looking up at a blank white
wall. The wall brightens and shimmers into life with a series of
3-D images.
    There’s a picture of Andrew Jackson Williams,
standing in front of the CABIN CREEK sign
— except there’s no motel on that corner now. The sign says CABIN CREEK CLEANERS. But Dad and I were
just there in June.
    And how did they find out, anyway? Were they
following us?
    “This is from the Daily
Oklahoman site. Headlines from a few days ago. A town named
Vinita. You’ve heard of it?”
    I don’t say anything.
    Number Thirty keeps talking. “It’s a man
named Andrew Jackson Williams. He wrote a book called The Time Problem . About time travel. Have you heard of that ?”
    “No.”
    “No, we didn’t think so. It was published in
1969. The hippies back then really liked the book. They thought it
was ‘far-out’ and ‘cosmic.’ But A.J. never really liked
hippies.”
    “What’s a hippie?” I ask.
    “Never mind.” Now it’s Mr. Howe’s turn. I
guess the Twenty-Fives are just going to keep quiet. “The point is,
Eli, Andrew Jackson Williams died in 1969, too. Right after his
book came out.”
    It’s a good thing everyone’s looking at the
wall screen, and not my face. I’m feeling pretty nervous. “He
died?”
    “Apparently. In the middle of a thunderstorm.
According to the news stories we could find. Except that suddenly,
he’s been seen again all over his hometown of Vinita.”
    More shots of him go by, posing with a vidpad
— like it’s some strange object from space— and standing in front
of a church, giving a lecture. You can tell all the pictures are
recent.
    “Is he a ghost?”
    “He doesn’t seem to think so. He claims that
during the storm, he just walked out of the motel he owned, and
when the storm broke, here he is, fifty years later.” There’s
another picture of him in front of the cleaners. There’s still no
motel.
    “Mr. Williams says it has to do with a sudden
disturbance in time. Though when local authorities asked him about
it, he said they’d have to read his book.” Mr. Howe shrugged.
“Except the book’s been out of print for nearly fifty years.”
    There’s a thunk as a
copy lands on the table near me. Even in the dark, I can see it’s
old and beat-up. The whole