Alabama Zack – Chapter XVII

Introduction

"Alabama Zack" is a 40-chapter science fiction serial, published in the Scholar and Scribe community once a week on Wednesdays.

You can start the serial from the beginning by visiting the Curated Collection.

Previously in our story

Alabama Zack, our hero and a war veteran, found himself standing on a train station platform in another time and dimension. At his feet lay a man in a brown suit. The man was dead, and Zack was arrested and jailed for murder.

Zack has amnesia: he can not remember how he arrived on that platform, let alone whether or not he had anything to do with the man's death.

Zack has met three people who are helping him to recover his memory and prove his innocence: the doctor, whom Zack met on the train station platform, the P.I. Cork McGraw, and Cork's maid Matilda.

In last week's chapter, having realized that Zack had been transported out of their dimension by sitting in Cork's red wingback, which is a transporter device, Cork attempted to follow him and bring him back, using the doctor's knowledge of dimension jumping to guide him. Cork successfully jumped ... and, surprisingly, Matilda did as well, even though she was not sitting in the transporter.

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The hero of our story stood before the haystack in his folks' barn with his mouth hanging open. He dropped his pitchfork. Cork McGraw and Matilda had just appeared out of nowhere, seemingly on the shaft of light that streamed down from the open cupola.

In Zack's dimension – which resembles our own but is not quite the same – a week had passed since he found himself sitting on the front porch of his boyhood home. His mother and father had welcomed him home as though it were his first time back since the war, and in that first commotion he had recovered – without knowing it was a recovery – the memory of his three month walk home from Lee's surrender in Virginia. This had displaced the other world: before they had sat down to supper, Cork, Matilda, the doctor and all of his experiences in that dimension had disappeared down the black hole of his memory.

But, a stray memory disturbed him: he was certain he had already had his war homecoming once, including a neighborhood barn dance. At the dance, his parents had given him a cowboy hat. This memory of the dance and his cowboy hat was so clear, yet his parents knew nothing of it – and he didn't have the cowboy hat.

Now, in the barn, he recognized Cork and Matilda without knowing how. They stood in the light – a large man with his arms splayed as though to catch himself from falling, and a Negro woman smiling as though overjoyed to see him. The man spoke, but the shaft of light seemed to trap his words. It was as though they didn't belong there, like they were standing in the light by sheer force of will, and it was a losing battle. Their image waxed and waned in strength, appearing extra bright and then almost fading out.

They needed his help.

He sprang forward and reached his hands out to grab a shoulder of each, to hold them in place. They still waved in and out. They all laced their arms together to form a circle. The light grew very bright, and the hay and beams and box stalls disappeared. Then they were falling.

“This can't be real; it's not real; it's not real,” Zack said, over and over, and he screwed his eyes shut. His voice was the only sound he heard, until someone shushed him, and he felt hands smoothing his brow. He opened his eyes and found himself on the floor in a book-lined study. Just past the end of his feet, Cork and the doctor spoke in hushed consultation, while Matilda knelt beside him.

“What the hell is happening?” he said.

“Hush now,” she soothed. “We're going to figure that out. You just rest now; you been through it. Just rest them eyes.”

Zack closed his eyes, and he slept.

Next week in our story

He dreamed of a time when he was 9 years old and he had also slept uncomfortably on the floor. It had been on the planks in his family's first cabin in Alabama, on a sticky summer night. He had tossed and turned and barely reached sleep. Through it he had remained aware of the bullfrogs croaking by the pond hundreds of yards away from the cabin's front porch.

Chapter XVIII
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