"Sal," he says, startled, "you ought come see this."
A few feet away, an old woman looks up from a massive tome several feet thick, wrapped in ancient, cracking leather, arranged on a low table to facilitate wrangling its girth. "What is it, Jack?" she asks, tired from hours of reading.
"Can't rightly say, Maam. I think you ought see't, all the same." That was Jack's way, the easy, calm acceptance of an old man who's witnessed most everything. But his job as watchman only meant he could recognize trouble. Sal, as always, shot the trouble.
She stands up with an easy grace, seemingly untouched by the countless years marking her visage with lines, skin and transparent as thin as wet parchment. Jack motions toward an old manual image caster currently focused on a much older piece of technology: a Remmington typewriter gleaming black and new, perched atop a withered oaken desk. He had the presence of mind to freeze the playback and zoom on the finished document stacked neatly to its right, and some bluish milky overlay superimposed itself over a specific paragraph, highlighting what, exactly, caught the old man's attention.
"Thorough as usual," she comments, walking a bit closer to peer attentively into the scene, quickly reading through the passage. "Damn!" she curses. "It's all gone to hell already." She turns and silently prompts Jack for his opinion, or maybe a simple nod.
He didn't have it in him—not the strength, nor the energy—to lie to himself. "No, Sal. I reckon Hell don't want nothin' ta do with't. T's bad. Worse mayhap."
It was Sal's turn to affect a slow nod. Jack's intuition wasn't often wrong, and Duality, for all its statistical knowledge of the universes, couldn't beat an experienced gut-feeling. She raises a hand to her head and eases into a lush contorting chair next to Jack, leaning backwards and massaging her temples in concentration.
Jack didn't like that. Not at all. Whatever Duality didn't know, Sal seemed to have an utter instinct to handle; cats always landed on their feet, and Sal eerily answered questions before they were asked. That was reality here. It was how things worked. For her to be surprised by anything, immediately terrified the jaded old man.
Taking a chance, he twists his chair toward the book Sal was always reading. That ridiculous cliche, a giant dusty bulk of yellowed paper and impossibly thick leather, constantly invoked his suspicion, tripping alarms old and new through his psyche, of things wrong and out of place. Any book, surrounded by wonders of technological might even he was still acclimating himself to accept, would be a pointless anachronism. Sal wrote in it, Sal read from it, Sal probably dreamt about it. The whole process was maddeningly deliberate, as if the book was a reminder of something.
Long ago, he'd asked her its purpose. Just what is that thing? he'd inquired. And Sal responded with a smile and exactly what he needed to hear, before the last word left his mouth. She hadn't prepared a speech, and he didn't sense sweet lies upon her lips, and it oddly made sense, though even many years later, he still cringed in its somehow tainted aura. Sal said it was her guide, and being as he, nor any of the others, could decipher the writing, which swam and churned in a revolting miasma of vibrating focus, he'd no choice but to trust her. It wasn't magic—that much he knew—but a living entropy tuned specifically to Sal. She saw only paragraphs, words jotted possibly in her own hand, as if a teenager put at ease by her significant past exploits.
"The bastard has practically yanked the entire town into his own little world. People are writing about It like some kind of hero." She slides her hands from her temples to cover her face outright, pressing a vibrant sigh through them in frustration. "And Kyle has no clue," she adds with a hint of disgust.
Startled by his friend's outburst, Jack quickly regains his composure and mulls over his unease again. "No'mm, he don't. But you do, and that's summ't."
"Unfortunately, no; I don't. It's a funny thing, living outside of time, yet bound by its passage. Duality could spend years meticulously explaining the theory of where we are, but I'll never understand it. It's not meant for us, Jack. Duality can barely see Kyle, let alone map his timeline. All I have is what's written in that book," she stops and weakly raises her left arm toward the vast compendium that so distressed Jack.
"But summ't wrong with't." he reasons.
She shouldn't have been surprised by that insight, but his accuracy was both unlikely and inevitable. "Yes, Jack. Something's wrong with it. I can't read it, Jack. I can't." She emphasizes the last, hoping to drive home the true danger. "Now I see why all of you don't even look at the damn thing when it's open. It's like trying to read vibrating Japanese through vaseline. I get seasick just thinking about it."
Jack's spine stiffens in his chair, stomach rolling in shock. He opens his mouth to deny, or reject her last sentence, but knows the futility. Something in that book was beyond her understanding, and of course it related to Kyle. He settles with an angry scowl and a grunt, languidly slamming his loose fist on the console.
"And it's spreading, Jack. Pages I could read yesterday are falling out of focus while I review them. I tried reading around the holes, and everything just melts into them. I have to do something."
And there it was; exactly what Jack didn't want to hear. Sal would have to directly interfere, using more than hints and prods, gently guiding Kyle to some vague triumph.
"You're leaving," he says. It wasn't a question.
She relaxed and closed her eyes. "I am."
"Bring back some'at Rocky Road, Maam."
She couldn't help but giggle. Were Jack sitting in the Library of Alexandria while it burned, he would send a page to fetch more ink. There was work to be done, and damn the consequences. "I'll remember," she promised through a genuine grin, the first she'd worn for days.