The Time Twister

By Emil Petaja

Scanned by BW-SciFi

Proofed by mabee

Ebook version 1.0

Release Date: July, 12th, 2003

Published by

DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.

750 Third Avenue

New York, N.Y. 10017

Copyright ฉ 1968 by Emil Petaja

All rights reserved. No part of this

book may be reproduced in any form or

by any means without the prior written

permission of the Publisher, excepting

brief quotes used in connection with

reviews written specifically for inclusion

in a magazine or newspaper.

Dell ฎ TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

Manufactured in The United States of America

First printing—September 1968

CHAPTER ONE

Art Mackey's cliffhanger tape was a long time reaching Steve. Lord knows where and how Art had ever mailed it, up in that godforsaken wilderness!

Steve's injuries had shunted him from hospital to hospital, even over to the Berkeley research complex for tests, right back where he started from, his home base for years of philosophical-anthropology studies. It was the chunk of shrapnel in his frontal cerebrum. That happy little souvenir of South Asia. Part of it had wormed back in. By the time they had found it, half his cranium had been replaced in silver, with weird new bionics crystal cells, lab-grown just for him, hemstitched in for good measure. A cause célèbre in brain-surgery annals, but all Dr. Stephen H. McCord wanted now was out.

He glanced out of his window over the Presidio and the Golden Gate, whistled, and went back to his packing. Gad, what a mess he had accumulated in his eight months of hospital hopping! He wasn't sure what came next, but for the moment—just for the moment—all he asked was out. Out! Anywhere! He gulped back the frightening prospect of having to think out each day's problems after all the spoon-feeding, and with that new silver-plated brain of his!

Grabbing up his shaving gear in the bathroom, he glanced at his face in the mirror. He winced at how lean it was, and sallow, in spite of his stints with the sun-lamp. Street clothes sagged on his thin, bony frame. Something of the amiable earnestness that had once crinkled his green-brown eyes so handily was missing; the dark pleasant hairline had receded an inch. There were new, craggy lines. Not quite bitter but not quite eager for life, either. His easily smiling mouth had thinned, picked up a cynical tic. When his excited hands dropped a hairbrush on the floor, he looked down at them. They shook, damn them! The medics said the trembling would go after awhile. It was a neural reaction to morbid dwelling on his body, the fear his brain wouldn't ever be as whip-sharp as it had been before.

"You'll be as good as new, Doctor McCord," they said. "Better. That silver plate and the crystal cells will outlast the rest of you."

"Protect me from werewolves, too."

"Luckily, none of the motor areas is affected," they said.

"Jolly."

Steve picked up the brush and ran it along the shaggy sides of his black Irish hair. Carefully. All the hirsute growth on top was phoney. What was it the TV comedians called them? Rugs? "Hey, that's a new crew-cut rug, isn't it?" They'd done a lot of transplanting and, at Steve's age, all those wiry blue-black curls would grow back in no time. They said.

"Package for Doctor Stephen H. McCord!" Bill Brandt, Ward C's newscaster and dispenser of good-natured scuttlebutt, burst in, grinning and waving a square flat object. "Glad I caught you, Doc! Hey, you look terrific in herringbone tweed!"

"Thanks. What you got?"

"Dunno. Looks like an underfed pizza. Do they grow pizza up in Montana?"

"Montana!"

Steve accepted the beat-up package, squinting at the smeared return. "Care of Postmaster, Missoula, Montana." He frowned.

"Who's Art Mackey?" Bill wondered cheerfully. They'd gotten to be friends and most of the Army and U. S. Marine patients liked it when he bent an ear their way.

"Art? An old buddy. I first met Art Mackey at U. C. He was their star halfback. Big blonde Finn. I told you about him. Been wondering if he'd ever get around to writing."

"Oh, yeah. I remember Art Mackey. Big name around the Berkeley campus a few years back. Funny, you two getting to be such good friends. Him, football. You, egghead science and all."

Steve smiled. "So I like football. I looked up Art when I was writing my thesis on A Study of the Ural-Altaic Language Group. I was boning up on Finnish, trying to plow through the Kalevala legends in the original. Art Mackey was the only Finn I could find who spoke Suomi."

"How about that!"

"Art's family lived in Montana. His father kept him brushing up until he died."

"I used to go with a Finn girl. 'Mackey' doesn't sound Finnish. Mostly their names run to ten syllables and sound like cracking nuts with your teeth."

"It was probably 'Makki' to start with. I ran into that name on my trip to Lapland the summer before Uncle Sam pointed the finger at me. One of the few pleasures of that Asian mess was running into Art again, our long talks about Finland, all that."

"Hey! It was Art who saved your life, wasn't it?"

"Yes. I had no medical degree, but I'd had premed training before I switched to anthropology research. It was Art Mackey, all right. I was doing ambulance duty. Got too near the action. A blockbuster splattered my jeep all to hell and gone. Art yanked me out from under, toted me to safety."

"You owe Finn Mackey your life. No wonder you want to hear what he's up to!"

Steve thumbnailed open the frayed edge of the square, flat box. "It's a tape, all right. I gave Art a Sony recorder before he left. He promised not to write, but I thought he might manage to talk me a tape. It's been two months since he left."

"For where?"

"Hellmouth."

"Hellmouth!"

"You won't find it on any map. It's only a wide spot in the road and no road. 'Way hell and gone up in the hills. Logging town of some kind. One of those little sawmills like up in Humboldt County."

"Why'd Art pick a dead end like Hellmouth?"

"He went to find a girl."

"Figures. Beautiful blonde Finn, I suppose?"

"Ilma's beautiful all right. She was down here in San Francisco for a couple years. She was a ballet dancer. Art used to read me parts of her letters. Then, after she went back to Montana to take care of her father, nothing."

"A mystery, eh?"

Steve nodded, frowning. "Her father and her older brother, Yalmar, lived on this farm just outside Hell-mouth. When Ilma was thirteen, her father'd sent her to her spinster aunt in Astoria to get a good education. When the aunt died, Ilma joined a small ballet company and ended up with the San Francisco Ballet for one season. She was good. Very good. But—"

"Yes?" Bill egged.

"Things kept happening to her. Accidents. Like the cliff suddenly dropping out from under her when she was walking alone on Land's End. Like the funny storm that came up one Sunday morning when she was sailing outside the Gate with friends. I guess you might say, besides her father's being old and sick, Ilma was running back to the haven of her childhood home."

"Back to the old farm where nothing ever happens."

"You might say that. But why didn't she write to Art after she got back home? They were only waiting for him to get out of the Army before they got married. Why didn't she write? All those months?" Steve weighed the spool of tightly wound Mylar tape in his hand thoughtfully.

"Well, you know those hick towns." The curious intern's face brightened, eyes glinting with all the avidity of a voyeur's. "Suppose I take a run down to the outpatient clinic and borrow a tape player? We'll give old Art a fast listen, eh!"

Steve shrugged, then shook his head. "Sorry. I want to get the hell out of here. I've got things to do."

"Oh?" Bill Brandt didn't believe him and showed it. "Okay, stingy-guts. But let me know how they make out? Promise?"

Steve promised.

It was midmorning. Ten-thirty-five by his Omega. A hell of a time to go anywhere, especially when Steve didn't have much of anyplace to go. He had no family; any friends he'd made in his bookish life had drained off to the work of the world, one way or another. Three years do that. It was October. One of those brass-bright, Bay Area days; the hills of Marin lay like smokey cutouts against the skyline. From the cab window he watched the Marina freeway spin by, gave Fort Mason a wince, the shiny boats of St. Francis Yacht Harbor an envious look.

Where? Now he had it! Art's tape was burning a hole in his tweed pocket, but where to play it? What else? "Take me to Tony's Restaurant in North Beach. You know where that is?"

The driver knew. Steve had met Ilma at Tony's. That last evening was clear and sharp in his war-ravaged brain now, as the Yellow Cab swung down Bay and took the sharp right turn uphill two blocks to the modest bistro. Tony's had never made any of the best restaurant lists and for this his regulars were selfishly grateful; the food was sublime, the drinks, liberal and perfect, the panoramic view of the fishing fleet, Alcatraz and Angel Island, magnํfico.

It was young Tony's (in his fifties but young because his father, old Tony, was now in his eighties and sunned himself in the square fronting St. Peter and Paul's between bocce ball games with old cronies) Steve and Art had picked for their last dinner before Art left for overseas, Steve soon to follow.

Two years plus the tides down there had swept under the Golden Gate Bridge. Paying off the cab and swinging down the stairs where a moustachioed retainer was swabbing out the entrance, Steve felt a little like he was coming home—and that Tony's was all the "home" he had to come back to.

"Not open yet," the moustached one grumbled.

"I know, but I'm a friend of Tony's. Is he around?"

"In the kitchen."

Tony Baccigaluppi sidled his rotund torso between the tables stacked with chairs for the morning mop-up, peering fiercely across the gloomy, oregano-fragrant restaurant. On the point of booting the intruder out so that he could get back to his lunch preparations, he gave a little yelp of welcome when he saw who it was.

"Doctor Stephano! How good for you to come see Tony!" He skittered across the damp tile floor with practiced ballet expertise. "I heard about the operation. How are you, Doc? And how is the big footballer, Arturo?" He swiped his meaty hands down the big butcher's apron and pumped Steve's hand vigorously.

"I'm fine, Tony. The family?"

Tony went into a grimacing dissertation on teenagers while he pulled Steve to his favorite alcove and the best view. Still chattering, he bustled away for the family coffee pot and two sturdy Italian mugs.

"Now. Tell me what they did to you." He clucked and went ahead talking. "I remember how I used to hear the two of you arguing—that was while you were still in college and Arturo was a big name in football and you were studying medicine—"

"I didn't quite have the stomach for it, I guess. Anyway, I like research in anthropology better. Glad I switched."

"—and you told Arturo that, if you had to be in one of their blasted wars at all, it would be to do what you could to patch people up and not—" Tony broke off with a toothy laugh. "Forget all that! You're back now.

But where's your buddy? Where's Arturo, the Flying Finn? Wasn't that what they called him?"

"That was Nurmi," Steve smiled. "Art Mackey's gone up to Montana to find— Tony, do you remember the last night we were here? Art and I sat right here waiting for Ilma. She had a late rehearsal at the Opera House, and when she finally came down those stairs, she was—"

"Radiant! Like something out of a dream!" Tony's eyes lighted up and he kissed his fingers at the brief elbow-stairs entrance, making the fat swabber blink. "She was still in her costume. Green, pale green. She moved in out of the fog like a dryad. And when she tossed back her great velvet cloak. All that hair down to her shoulders. Like spun gold! Do I remember!"

Steve, too, stared and saw Ilma there, hurrying down out of the drifting evening fog, stopping to search the bustling, smokey room with those large silver-blue eyes. Seeing Art. Smiling. How the whole world seemed to tilt. How Steve couldn't take his eyes away from this dazzling forest creature. Ilma Halvor was something out of a rare, half-remembered dream of old, old times.

"...and when she danced The Bird Girl in the new Green Mansions ballet, everybody said she would go straight to the top. There was something supernatural about Ilma, they said, and I believe them. Then—all of a sudden—she left the ballet! Disappeared! Why?" Tony's opera loving soul was wounded by such dereliction to duty and that he knew Ilma and her lover, Art the footballer, made him scowl and cluck while he swigged his mud-thick espresso.

"She went back to Hellmouth. Her father needed her. Izza Halvor is very old. Very old. Sick. There's a brother, too, Art told me. Yalmar. Yalmar's—strange. A little off in the head. Wanders the hills a lot. Fiercely devoted to Ilma, but not much help with an old, sick father."

"So Ilma went back to the sticks. Such a waste!" Tony sighed.

"She might come back to the theater," Steve said. "Art's up there now." He frowned out at the brass bright day.

"Something's wrong, Stephano."

Steve shrugged. "I don't know that there is. But Art hadn't heard from her, not a word in over a month."

"These hick towns," Tony pointed out. "How do they get their mail in this Hellmouth? By pack mule?"

Steve grinned uneasily. "As a matter of fact, I just got a message from Art."

"What does he say?"

"Haven't played it yet."

"Played it?"

"It's a tape." Steve dug it out and unwrapped it. "I brought along my Sony transistor player. Mind?" He removed the tape player from its leather case and threaded up Art's tape. The battered plastic spool wobbled a little as the tape end caught in the rewind spool and snapped to.

Tony's wide face hung over the table avidly. Steve resisted his impulse to invite solitude until he knew just what Art had to say, but it was Tony's wife yelling from the kitchen that it was almost eleven and nothing was ready that popped an Italian oath from him and his reluctant removal to his pre-lunch duties.

Steve waited until the kitchen batwings slapped Tony's broad rear, sighed relief as he took a sip of strong coffee, and flipped the threaded tape to "forward."

CHAPTER TWO

"Hi, Doc. How are you making it?"

The mechanical voice that was somehow Art Mackey's deep baritone an octave or two higher seemed strained. Or was it the minuscule speaker? Or Steve's imagination? Art was always the easygoing, like everybody sort who took things as they came. Yet the self-conscious banalities he put in for openers twanged with unnecessary touches that didn't quite match the outgoing Finn Mackey personality.

"I hope that silver plate and the crystal cells aren't giving you too much trouble."

Little by little the banalities brushed away like crumbs. Then it was as if Art were sitting across from Steve, where Tony had sat a couple minutes before. Art blurted out his doings, his thoughts, in a completely honest, ingenuous manner that irritated those social groups who prefer conversational sparring and the artfully phoney commercial facades.

"Not hearing from Ilma had me scared, Doc! You know how much those letters meant to me! I know Old Izza, her father. A wonderfully whacky old guy with a beard like a red fire, full to the brim with old stories of water nymphs and wood trolls. He half believes them all, Steve. I think that is what gave Ilma her dryad— half-shy, half-animal—aura. That and living 'way up here in this godforsaken wilderness. Then there's Yalmar."

"What about Yalmar?" Steve murmured at the pause.

"Yalmar's as ugly as Ilma is beautiful, Steve. His back is twisted and he's got those long apish arms and bandy legs. Guess that's why he prefers roaming the hills with his rifle to mingling with the villagers of Hellmouth. Yalmar's absolutely awed by Ilma. Treats her like a goddess. He's quite a bit older, around thirty now, I guess. He wouldn't even talk to Izza when the subject of her leaving to go to school came up. He left the farm and hiked 'way up in the mountains and stayed there for weeks. Anyway, Yalmar's odd. That's why Ilma came back to Hellmouth. That and what hap­pened. Those peculiar accidents."

Another pause and a sucking noise that followed a tapping: Art relighting his pipe.

"Get on with it, you big Finlander!"

"Let me tell you a little about this valley. It's wild up here. Wild and beautiful. And completely isolated. What happened in the 1880s was that a Swede named Lars Swenson imported a whole boatload of Finns from Oulu to help him build the town. Timber was needed for the mines—gold mines around Helena. Silver, too. And copper, lots of copper. Swenson's idea was to build his sawmill way up here in the wilderness where the timber was thickest. True, the country was hard to get up into, but so was the rest of this Blackfoot Indian area in those days. Fish and game were plentiful and the Finns that Swenson brought in were inured to hardships and long cold winters, being from the northern wilds, insular, and indifferent to the whimsies of civilization. Furthermore, they were hard workers, fiercely honest, and they know lumber. That's always been one of Finland's key industries.

"Hey! I'm sounding off like a history book! But you could write a book about how Swenson brought his little band of immigrant Finns up here, built up the town and his sawmill 'way hell and gone in what the Black-feet and the Shoshones call 'devil country.' He put in a narrow gauge spur line along the river to the falls that plunges down into Swan Lake. The Finns were contented. They liked the isolation. Sometimes young bucks would up and hike out and never come back, but the old ones stayed.

"Even after Anaconda Copper bought out all the other small mills and set up their big Bonner unit, obviously a lot more efficient than these little one-saw outfits up in the sticks, the Hellmouth Finns stuck. The older ones, that is. My father was one of the young ones who left when the mill shut down. Swenson's dream had fizzled after only twenty years. Sure, the copper mines and the new building going on in the sheltered Bitter-root valleys and around Missoula still needed lumber, but Anaconda owned all the mines now and they could provide it faster and cheaper than 'Swenson's Folly.' ... embittered, Lars Swenson went back to Oslo to die, broke.

"But the Finns stayed!

"There was a terrible forest fire that swept through the Hellmouth Valley in 1906. One of the worst Mon­tana has ever seen and that's saying a lot. Dad said the sky was full of fire and the storm winds rolled black smoke a hundred miles across country. Kids hid; they thought it was the end of the world. My father and mother left when the mill shut down. He took a millwright job with the A.C.M. down in Bonner, then went down to South America on a mining deal. My mother died when I was born. Dad used to tell me about Hellmouth as it was when he was a kid. He loved it. It was a dream of his to go back some day. Down there where it was always warm and balmy, my father would suck his pipe and talk endlessly about Hellmouth, about how hard the winters were, but how he wanted to go back. About Old Izza Halvor and his fat wife. About the little General Merchandise Store with the post-office boxes lined up in the corner where Jack Temikka, the skinflint proprietor the villagers called 'Squire Temmy' behind his back, had his bookkeeper's cage and the big iron safe with his name on it in fancy curlicues. He told me about Mamie Puski's Boarding-house for single men and widowers, about the town pump where he toted potable water home across his back with a yoke and two galvanized buckets. About the 'water things' the villagers who lived along Hellmouth River had—the hand crank winches—for drawing up wash water and to water their truck gardens in the back yards.

"You know, Doc, Dad got so wrapped up talking about Hellmouth—the Hellmouth he knew when he was a kid—that I could visualize every rock in the road. The little schoolhouse across the field. The old covered bridge across the bend in the river, and Izza Halvor's tar-paper farmhouse. Everything. He used to tell me that, if he never made it back to Hellmouth, I was to go in his place. He never mentioned the big fire. I don't believe he wanted to think what it might have done to his beloved town. No. Forest fire has a way of skipping across ridges, treetopping where the lodgepole pines are highest. That's what happened up there in Dad's wonderful valley. It had to be like that. Hellmouth was a dream that couldn't ever die. There was something inevitable about it—everlasting. Like the rawboned, horn-handed Finns who built it. They could not die! They were like the hills and the blue lakes and the tumbling mountain trout streams. Nothing could kill them. Not the forty-below blizzards that raged down out of the Canadian Rockies. Not fire, nor flood, nor the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and progress!"

Steve gazed off across the Bay where a Matson liner was steaming majestically out between the pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge, the pilot boat making a V in the gold-tipped caps as it purred back to its dock. Art had stopped his prologal recitation on a highly dramatic, highly uncharacteristic note. His father, sweltering down in tropical Bolivia, had infused his son with a kind of supernatural longing for what he had known and loved when he was young. A reliving of his Hellmouth boyhood through his son. Nothing so strange about that. Yet—Steve's studies of the Finns and their mores and moods suggested more. Finns were different, in a way, from everybody else. As if, Steve sometimes thought, they had originated racially on another planet. In the Middle Ages, wizards were always said to come from the dark, cold north—and that north was Finland. A Finnish sailor was a Jonah because he could sing up a storm or extract a tot of rum from the ship's mast any time he wanted to by sticking his sharp pukko in it.

Art Mackey was being all of that now. Steve sensed it and the hair on the back of his neck prickled while he waited. Also, it was as if Art was afraid to go on, as if all of this prelude was an evasion.

"What happened?" Steve whispered tautly. "What did you find up there?"

"I hiked up the back way into Hellmouth Valley, Doc. Missoula would have been closer, but—I really don't know why I drove the secondhand jeep I bought up through the Flathead and around the long way, but I played it cosy. I talked to nobody. Don't ask me why, only—something told me to play it that way. Something is telling me not to talk this tape right now and if I were across the bridge on the Hellmouth side, and not perched up here in the open loft door of Izza Halvor's barn, I wouldn't be able to. The talk would not register on the tape. Don't ask me why, Doc."

The chill in Steve's spine deepened.

"I hiked in the last forty miles. Took two days. This country is really rough. I puffed up the last hunk of trail, which was all grown together with weeds and snowmelts, and there was that big sentinel lodgepole pine Dad always told me about. Still there. By that big lightning-split boulder that marks the summit and the road that winds down into Hellmouth. It was dusky. Around seven thirty. I reached the rock, dropped my pack, and leaned back for a rest. At first, I didn't even look down that winding road into town. As if—like Dad—I was scared about what that 1906 fire had done to Hellmouth.

"Then I squinted down and there it was.

"It was lamplighting time. Down there the triple row of neat gray frame houses curving along the river bank were blooming up with yellow light in their windows, one by one. I could just make out the town pump on its plank platform, with the battered tin dipper set on the top of it for a fast drink. The barroom across from Squire Temmy's General Merchandise Store showed light when a couple of booted figures tramped up on its sheltered porch and then went in. Rillo's Bar was in case you preferred beer.

"Resting, beat from my long hike, I let my eyes fol­low the gently nodding cottonwoods lining the river-bank up the mill road. Yes, Swenson's sawmill was still there. The three screen-topped smokestacks loomed above the amorphous lumps of buildings that constituted the sawmill proper, the planer, and even a small box factory. The mill lay against a pale wall of rock rising a sheer three hundred feet, with the towering ridge above it still showing evidences of that long-ago holocaust. Steam rose whitely out of a minor pipe stack; but it was the great trapezoidal sawdust burner that dominated the mill. Its big bullet shaped end glowed red from the droning work going on in the mill, even at that hour.

"You know, Doc, somehow I wasn't so surprised. This was just how Dad said Hellmouth was. Why should it be any different? I rested up, munching down a dry sandwich of cold meat and stale French bread; then I picked up my packsack and hiked down to the pump and had a long cool drink of fresh mountain water. Then I went over to Mamie Puski's Boardinghouse and got me a room for the night. She seemed happy to see me, as if we were old friends. She showed me to a little empty room under the eaves and wished me goodnight. In Finnish. Boy, did I sleep! Not only from the two-day hike in country that would defy a Rocky Mountain sheep, but out of a sublime kind of gratitude for everything. It was like—you know—like coming home."

Steve scowled down at the dwindling tape. Damn Art! He had wasted most of his time getting into that bucolic Shangri-La. What about Ilma? Where was she? What about her ancient tale-teller father and that kooky brother, Yalmar?

The tape wound on aggravatingly while Art repacked his pipe and took his time about lighting it. Steve could just see him, his booted legs dangling down from that hay-pitching door of the Halvor barn, taking his time about striking a match and drawing the smoke in to his critical satisfaction. Steve swore down at the fast-dwindling tag end of tape.

"What about Ilma?" he yelled out loud.

"Doc, it's funny..."

"Funny!"

"Everything's just the way Dad said it was—sixty years ago! Doc, I know these people live long and healthy lives but—you know, the next morning I walked across the field to the little schoolhouse to have a talk with Toini Teckilla, the schoolteacher, also librarian. Also the one person who relates this dreamy little mountain village with the Great Outside. When I asked questions about the mill and how come Hellmouth showed no change, I got nowhere. Mamie Puski. The storekeeper. Two old codgers whittling on the bench in front of Rillo's Bar. Nowhere. They smiled, friendly as hell. I was a Finn like them, not a toistalainen. Surely I didn't need explanations for such obvious things as this! Of course, the able-bodied men were all at the mill, working! Why wouldn't they be?

"So I went to see Toini Teckilla, the old-maid schoolteacher. She only gave me a few minutes away from her class, and she seemed more annoyed than anything else by the kind of questions I asked her about Hellmouth. As if I were putting her on or something. Making a joke. My talk about San Francisco and the Army and having flown in from Spokane didn't register.

She pursed her lips tight, finally, and wouldn't talk at all.

"Until I asked about Ilma and the Halvors. Then she ushered me outside between the gigglers at the old-fashioned double desks and pointed toward the old covered bridge across the river, where it makes a sharp turn. 'They're on their farm, as they always are! You know the Halvors! They don't mix. They aren't really part of the town, you know!'

"I knew, Doc. Even when Ilma was a child, old Izza and the rest stuck to their farm across the river and seldom went into town at all. Ilma said Izza made some­thing of a story about trolls and evil spirits living under the bridge on the cattail islands. Ilma tried school for a year or so, but it didn't work out somehow. She was so painfully shy from living alone with her father and her hunchbacked brother, Yalmar; and then Yalmar, being so possessive and protective of Ilma's every step, he'd lurk around the schoolhouse and peek in the windows, scaring the kids and getting called names. So when her mother was drowned in the river one swolle...