The Final Charge of Mr. Electrico Read online

  His sword, the only memento that remained, was gone.

  He shouted his grandson’s name, so upset he didn't have to search for it even for a split second. No answer came, but Mr. Electrico suspected that could have been because his voice was no longer loud enough to carry downstairs. His knees were unfortunately not the only things giving out. He tried again, more forcefully, to use the voice he’d once owned when he’d captivated crowds, but though his mind remembered, his lungs would not.

  “Josh!”

  There was still no answer, so he headed slowly to the top of the stairs and called out again. His grandson was not normally gone so early in the day, so it was strange he shouldn’t be there now. As Mr. Electrico was about to take his first step down, a figure came into view from the living room.

  Mr. Electrico froze. It wasn't Josh.

  It was the kid.

  Ray.

  He seemed exactly as he’d been all those years before, unchanged by time. And in one hand, the sword. Ray laughed as he made a few passes through the air with the metal, marking the air between them.

  “You were looking for this,” he said, his voice as frozen in time as was his face.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Mr. Electrico.

  “What do you think?” he said, leaping up one step, then back down again, repeating the move several times with glee. Mr. Electrico remembered what it was like to leap, but not when he’d last been able to do it. “What I’ve been doing ever since the day we met—living forever.”

  “That’s ... not possible,” Mr. Electrico said. Or was it? he thought. “Where have you been? Why are you here now?”

  “It seemed as if you needed me,” said Ray, pausing in his prancing to look up. “Needed me to find this. I doubted you’d have been able to on your own.”

  Ray flipped the sword in his hand so that its hilt was now pointed up toward the top of the stairs. It was an offering. An invitation. One Mr. Electrico desperately wanted to accept. But in that moment, he didn’t have the strength to walk down to receive it. His knees buckled, and he dropped to sit on the top step, suddenly unable to stand any longer.

  Mr. Electrico was glad Josh wasn’t present to see the weakness which had stolen over him. And so, of course, in that moment, from behind Ray came the sound of the front door being unlocked. Ray smiled, a buoyant smile Mr. Electrico recognized, and then looked briefly over one shoulder, unalarmed. He knelt, laying the sword down sideways across the bottom step, the blade so long it stuck out through the bannister.

  “There,” said Ray. “It’s yours again. No one should take it from you.”

  And then Ray backed out of sight, vanishing into the living room, just before Josh came into view from the front foyer. Mr. Electrico found himself without the breath to speak, so Josh was startled on seeing him there, at first not even noticing the sword.

  “Grandpa, why are you sitting up there like that?”

  Mr. Electrico heard the love in his voice, but he also heard the exasperation, and knew he should answer immediately. Josh had lately been accusing him of getting slow, and a snappy answer would help contradict that, but he had none. All he could think was — how is it that Josh missed seeing Ray? Before Mr. Electrico could think of anything to say, Josh noticed the sword on the bottom step, and his expression darkened.

  “So you found it,” he said. “I’m surprised. How did you manage to do that?”

  “You?” said Mr. Electrico. “You’re the one who took my sword? Not..."

  Mr. Electrico fell to silence. How could he dare reveal what he’d seen before Josh arrived home? His grandson was already having trouble accepting what he’d become, and that he'd mistakenly believed a boy he hadn’t seen in half a century had taken his sword would be...too much.

  “Not what?” said Josh.

  “Nothing. It’s just that...for a moment, I thought...never mind. But why? Why did you do it?”

  “I had to, Grandpa. You’re not safe with it anymore. Maybe you can be trusted with it when I’m here to supervise, but when you’re alone? No.”

  “That’s not true, Josh.”

  Mr. Electrico found himself trembling, whether from fear or anger he couldn't tell. But maybe it was neither, and only the trembling that came with the years.

  “Sadly, it is true. You’re not who you once were, grandpa. And after we got back from the park, after you fell asleep, I started realizing ... you could get hurt, without even meaning to.”

  As Josh spoke, he was hesitant in a way Mr. Electrico had never seen before, at times rocking from one foot to the other, at times seeming about to step over the sword and join him at the top of the stairs. Instead, he stayed in place, continuing to squeeze words out, words obviously as difficult to speak as they were to hear.

  “It’s not your fault,” Josh said, louder than he’d left off. “So I had to, you see? And look at you here with the sword again. You could have been hurt retrieving it. What if you’d fallen off the ladder and broken your neck? You shouldn’t be doing things like that, doing the things you once did. I wouldn’t want to find you that way. I love you, Grandpa. You know that don’t you? This is for your own good.”

  “What’s this about a ladder, Josh? I didn’t climb any ladder.”

  “Oh, grandpa, have you forgotten that already? You had to have used a ladder, or else how would you have gotten it down from where I stored it in the garage? If you can’t even remember that, it’s just one more reason you shouldn’t have it.”

  Josh stooped to pick up the sword, then turned toward the garage.

  “You can’t do this, Josh,” said Mr. Electrico, rising swiftly to his feet. The sudden movement left him dizzy, forcing him to press one hand against the wall to remain steady. “That’s mine! That’s all I have left.”

  “Then what’s it doing down here with you up there? You must have dropped it. Don’t you see? You might have cut yourself. Or fallen and run yourself through. No. No more. If you want to keep living here, please. Don’t try to find this again.”

  “Josh,” he said, as his grandson vanished, seeming no more or less real than the boy who had vanished on his arrival. Mr. Electrico would have shouted if he could, but he had no more energy with which to shout.

  “Later, Grandpa,” said Josh upon his return from the garage. “We’ll talk more later. We have some decisions to make.”

  Mr. Electrico said nothing as Josh walked up the stairs and squeezed past to his own bedroom. He did not want to talk more later. At least, not with Josh. He knew what was coming for him, he knew what those decisions would mean, and talking would only bring that fate toward him more quickly.

  Mr. Electrico waited until he could no longer hear Josh’s television vibrating through the thin walls and was sure his grandson was asleep, then snuck out of the house and stood on the front lawn. He’d head toward the park, he decided, where he’d spent most of the previous night.

  He loved the park, the way his scanning of the unpopulated vista brought back memories of the beginnings of things—the tents still unrolled, the ferris wheel unconstructed, the rubes asleep in their homes, and he needed that feeling now more than ever. That was almost the best part, those moments of before when anything could happen. It felt as if anything could happen tonight. But which way should he turn?

  He could still remember where the park was, couldn’t he?

  No. He couldn’t.

  As he stood in indecision, fearful of choosing the wrong way, even more fearful of choosing no way at all, his breath turned to mist in the cool night air, and as that cloud pulsed, appearing and disappearing with each exhalation, through it, off on the nearest corner, under a streetlight, he could see Ray, waving the sword over his head, doing mock battle with a moth which hovered above him.

  Mr. Electrico’s sword.

  And then the kid danced out of the spotlight and into the darkness.

  Mr. Electro took off after him, perhaps, based on what his k
nees were telling him, more quickly than he should have, but he didn't dare lose him. He could make out his outline in the distance, always on the verge of disappearing, and as Mr. Electrico ran, so ran Ray. They moved through the night this way, twisting and turning along the maze of the subdivisions, the kid continually pausing off in the distance just long enough to be sure he was seen, but no longer, and then taking off again as soon as Mr. Electrico started after him again.

  By the time Mr. Electrico arrived at the park, he was gasping, and sure he could not have gone a single step further. For a moment, as he looked around, he thought he’d lost the kid, but there he was, sitting not on a bench, sitting not on the grass, but off in the empty playground, plopped on a mound of sand in front of the rut beneath the swings, a mound kicked high by the feet of a thousand children.

  The kid smiled, patting the sand beside him, and as Mr. Electrico settled down slowly, his legs protesting as they bent, he remembered the two of them having been side by side like that before, so many decades ago, when he had been so much younger, and the kid had been...

  ...exactly the same.

  “Why are you here?” asked Mr. Electrico, having to catch his breath to get even that single short sentence out.

  “Why are you here?” asked the kid, waving the sword to encompass the park.

  And then Mr. Electrico did know, know what he hadn't known before, but merely suspected.

  “Because I can almost see Lake Michigan,” he said. The past and the present rubbed up against each other in this place. It was what called him here time and again. Because if he squinted, and imagined, and remembered, he could see from one to the other.

  They sat in silence for awhile, looking off into the distance. Eventually, Mr. Electrico closed his eyes. Sometimes, in this place, he could see much better with them closed. But he could not see far enough. Not yet.

  “Did you bring me another trick?” he asked. “Another puzzle to solve?”

  “I did.”

  The kid rose, pointed the sword to his head, then allowed it to drop to his toes with a flourish, as if by lowering a sword, he was raising a curtain on himself. He bowed theatrically.

  “You? You’re the trick?”

  Ray nodded and smiled.

  “That’s not a trick,” said Mr. Electrico. “You staying the same, me growing older...that’s a joke.”

  “So how come neither of us is laughing?” said the kid, settling back down beside him in the sand. “No, it’s not a joke. I wouldn’t do that to you. It is, indeed, a trick. Last time we were together, you showed me the secret to how one worked. This time, it’s my turn to show you.”

  Mr. Electrico wanted to learn that trick, that secret. But there was something else which in that moment he wanted more.

  “I’d like my sword back,” he said.

  “In a moment.”

  The kid used the sword to make circles in the air in front of them, then figure eights, then x’s, then finally circles again.

  “You said we’d met before in a former life. Was that a lie you were telling me? A part of your act?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. And then, more forcefully, certain for the first time: “No.”

  “You said I was your friend. Was that a lie?”

  “No.”

  There had been no hesitation that time.

  “So we were friends in the last life,” said Ray. “We are friends in this one. And we will be friends in the next one as well.”

  “I’m glad of that,” said Mr. Electrico. “But you still haven’t answered my question, not fully. Why are you here?”

  “Because I wanted to thank you,” said Ray. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time, but I never had the chance. I could never reach you, not until now, when you were so close, because though I couldn’t come nearer to you, you could come nearer to me. The day I met you, the day you made sparks come out my ears and told me to live forever, that was the day everything changed. That was the day you gave me the future, the day I learned how strange and wonderful the world really was. That was the day...the day I decided to become a writer. I could never thank you, because I could never track you down. I tried to, I really did, but only now...only now..."

  Ray shrugged.

  “Anyway...thank you.”

  “You remembered,” said Mr. Electrico quietly.

  “Yes,” whispered Ray.

  “You remembered me telling you to live forever.”

  Ray nodded.

  “And did you live forever?”

  “I did,” said Ray. “Thanks to you, I will.”

  “So why haven't you changed? And why have I?”

  “That’s the magic, you see,” said Ray. “Because no one has yet to do this.”

  The kid stood, and with a gesture Mr. Electrico recognized as if he were gazing upon it in a mirror, because he had done it thousands of times himself, leaned down, extended the sword, and tapped him on the center of his forehead.

  “Live forever!” Ray shouted, with a voice that boomed far too loud for one so small. For a moment, the world seemed on fire. Mr. Electrico's skin prickled, and his hair stood on end, as he sensed the charge coruscating through him and connecting with a dormant engine within. Then, as the kid pressed the sword back into Mr. Electrico’s hand, the sky—whether it had been truly ablaze, or whether it had been just the old electricity running through his eyes anew—faded.

  “It’s yours now,” said Ray. “It always was yours.”

  Mr. Electrico leapt up, made a giddy hop, and struck his own slashes through the air. He laughed, feeling complete once more.

  “Ready to join me?” asked the kid. He gestured behind them, away from the shadow of Lake Michigan.

  Mr. Electrico turned, and in the distance, where suddenly it was daylight, could see the tents flapping in a gentle breeze. He could make out the banners, looking as fresh as the day they were first painted, covered with the images of his friends, images larger than life, but no larger than they lived on in his memory—The Sword Swallower and The Bearded Lady and the Illustrated Man and—

  —and look—on the largest stretch of canvas in the carnival—there he was, Mr. Electrico, bigger than life himself, too, but no bigger than life should be, his hair ablaze, his eyes sparking, his fingertips flashing lightning, fully again who he used to be.

  Who he was again.

  “Live forever,” Mr. Electrico whispered. “Yes...let’s.”

  He took Ray’s hand, and together, they headed toward the carnival.

  ___

  Copyright 2018 Scott Edelman

  Scott Edelman has published more than 90 short stories in magazines and anthologies such as Analog, The Twilight Zone, and many others. His collection of zombie fiction, What Will Come After, was a finalist for both the Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Memorial Award. Edelman worked for the Syfy Channel for more than thirteen years as editor of Science Fiction Weekly, SCI FI Wire, and Blastr. He has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.

  __

  Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by Rashida J. Smith.

  http://giganotosaurus.org

  [email protected]