A TOWI in Time

by J. Richard Jacobs

A dark figure moved quietly…his head held high through the rushing, heads-down flow of Friday evening pedestrians as they scurried for subway and bus connections that would take them out of this south side neighborhood and dump them in another, safer place. Any place would be safer, truth be told. They paid no attention to him as they skittered like so many cockroaches caught suddenly in bright light. All moving toward the packed street corner and their escape.
He turned abruptly out of the bobbing stream of humanity and entered the alley between a cheap hotel with rooms rented by the hour and Dinglemeyer’s Meat Market. He disappeared into the foreboding, quasi-permanent shadows of the brownstone buildings rising from the pavement on both sides of the narrow gash between them in a mocking, ugly, and painfully profane version of a modern Stonehenge.

The specter was in a hurry so he failed to make certain no one was watching. He knew that breaking rule number one in his job description, do nothing to attract the attention of the locals, could have disastrous results, but time was running short and in his zeal to beat the sun, he took the risk…in spite of the possible consequences.

---

Across the street, Melvin Steiner sat sipping lazily at a beer, pretending to be reading the afternoon paper. The paper was upside down. He noticed it but made no effort to correct the mistake.
Hey, almost no one reads anymore, so who will notice? he thought. He drummed aging fingers on the table, then took another swig from the bottle. “You’re late—as usual,” he mumbled to the air around him.

Steiner put the day-old paper down on the minuscule, round, expanded metal tabletop painted in different colors so many times it bore the appearance of a dog’s coat with a fourth-degree case of mange, then looked up at Dinglemeyer’s and shook his head slowly.
Used to be Kosher, he thought. Damned shame what has happened down here.
Something caught in the edge of his vision that gained his full attention. What appeared to be an elderly fellow wearing a dull gray cloak and black, broad-brimmed hat, both expensive-looking garments—too expensive for that part of town—slipped into the tight punctuation between buildings.

Normally he wouldn’t have taken notice, but there appeared to be something odd about the man’s movement. For one thing, his head was not bowed as was normal for the fear-of-eye-contact crowd that inhabited the region. On top of that, he moved as if he was floating above the pavement or schüssing the sidewalk on rollerblades. There was no up and down motion of the man’s head that one associates with a person walking. His image was vague and blurred as if he were there, but oddly out of focus for some reason. What Steiner saw was strange and not something a man like him could ignore.

Steiner laid the paper on the seat next to him, then extracted two dollars from his shirt pocket. He folded the bills tightly flat, slipped them under his half-full bottle, then crossed the street. He dodged the rush hour traffic expertly as he went. Hyperactive curiosity pulled him along by the nose and he had no choice but to follow. He knew his daughter wouldn’t arrive for at least another ten to twenty minutes and was compelled to have a closer look at that mysterious, fuzzy ghost of an old-timer.

Steiner wondered what business anyone would have in a place where only the homeless poor, pushing bent, rusting shopping carts with front wheels all awobble and filled to overflowing with their meager belongings and carpet remnants would occasionally make camp for the night. The permanent residents of these slashes between buildings were voracious rats. The alleys were also visited by starving cats in search of scraps from Dinglemeyer’s and, occasionally, a small, careless mouse that didn’t know what the rats and cats might do. Oh, and there were trash bins in there. Trash bins rarely cleaned that reeked with the odoriferous unsold overflow from Dinglemeyer’s.

Steiner was also more than a little perplexed by the odd appearance of the man’s fluid movement. His compulsive interest would bring a sudden and brutal end to his otherwise uneventful life since unwanted retirement set in on him a few months back.

---

Detective Shel Shapiro sauntered into the alley and motioned to his partner. He seemed to be a bit upset.
“Steiner’s daughter is across the street. The EMTs have her breathing in a sack right now, but they said we’ll be able to talk to her in a few. Poor kid, she’s really stressed-out big time,” Shapiro said to his partner, who was kneeling on the blood-spattered pavement near one of the body parts strewn from one end of the alley to the other.

He was searching for anything that might give up a scrap of information about how the mutilation of a once warm taxpayer came to be. He glanced up at Shapiro briefly and a look of exasperation spread across his face, then he returned to his study of the filthy and bloodied pavement in the alley.

“Yeah, well, you’d be a little uptight too if your old man came home in a dozen plastic bags. Speaking of which, gimme another baggie. Think I might have something here,” Eric Burke said as he pulled a pair of tweezers from his jacket pocket and picked up a small fragment of metal, apparently gold, with what seemed to be glass fused to one end of it. He turned it over slowly in the dull, late afternoon glow that barely managed to find its way to the bottom of the alley. Sharp, but dim sparks of light bounced off its glass-like end. The sun was fading fast and the forensics crew was hurriedly setting up portable light stands at the open end of the alley and on the rooftops.

“What kind of a sicko-psycho creep would do something like this?” Shapiro said and handed Burke another self-sealing evidence pouch.

“Who the hell knows, man? Maybe Jack the Ripper has come back from vacationing in the Bahamas and has decided to make our city his new haunt? Could be a wannabe chainsaw artist out practicing for his next gig? Who can say? Damn. I dropped it. Can you see it from where you are? Don’t wanna move around down here too much.”

“Nah—way too dark and my flashlight’s in the car. Just hang on a sec and we’ll have artificial daylight down here.”

“You know, from the looks of it, I’d say this poor old coot wasn’t hacked up at all. It looks to me more like he was pulled apart and mangled by…something.”

“I sure as hell hope the something that did the mangling isn’t still in here.”

“Shut up, Shell. I have a bad enough case of the jitters going without your help.”

---

Melvin Steiner picked up the paper from the seat and sat down. He laid the paper in his lap and took a sip from the dark brown bottle he brought to the table with him, then, out of habit, checked his watch. It was an act prompted by years of living by the clock, always being the one on time—an action certainly not necessary since they retired him from the office. Under protest, of course.

“Rachel’s always late,” he muttered. “Beautiful she is, but punctual she is not.”

“Do you mind if I sit here, Mr. Steiner?” a man’s voice asked.

The voice, though gentle and touched with a hint of a phony English accent, startled Steiner. He looked up to see a tall man sporting a full white beard and long hair that, equally white, sprayed out from the base of a broad, flat-brimmed black hat. Around his neck hung a heavy gold chain with what appeared to be large diamonds between the links. Expensive stuff if it wasn’t phony. Probably phony. Down here phony was the vogue. Like those foot-long crosses of gold-colored metal filled with cut glass dangling from the necks of the local gangbangers. Phony. Steiner recognized him as one of the TOWIs, a fanatically religious offshoot group that had moved in to fill the vacuum left by the Chassids who, quite sensibly, moved away from the deteriorating neighborhood a few years past.

Steiner was fascinated by the old guy’s penetrating, ancient but still sparkling eyes. There was something weird about those eyes. Not just the color, though royal purple was a bit odd in itself. Something about the pupils didn’t seem right, but it was hard to tell what it was in the vanishing light. He wondered how the man knew his name.

Hell, I haven’t been anywhere near a TOWI temple in my life and, If he’s recruiting, I’m not buying.

“Of course you may sit, if you wish. You a TOWI holy man?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Just a lucky guess. Okay…sit, but I tell you upfront, I’m not buying.”

“And I am not peddling, Mr. Steiner.”

“I’m sorry—that was rude of me. So, how is it you know my name?”

“That is of no importance. I am here because…because—How shall I say this so that you will understand?—because something is about to happen that will bring the most dire results to you, my friend.”

“And how on Earth do you know that? Got a crystal ball or something stashed in your coat? Got a direct line to TOWI, Himself?”

“No, not hardly, Mr. Steiner. The One Who Is, holier than we be He, has bestowed upon me an incredible endowment—and a terrible, frightening burden of responsibility along with it. I have been gifted with the power, although limited in some ways, to right a few of the wrongs around this part of the city. Right now I do not have much time for explanations. The sun is setting soon and I need to be prepared for His rising, but I must also deal with this…our problem…now. You, I am sorry to say, are…um…will soon be one of those wrongs that must be fixed, and that is why I am here.”

“Lots of things need fixing down here. So, from the way you said it, you’re here to take care of a wrong that hasn’t happened yet? I hope your predictions are better than the weatherman’s. How can you know this and how am I to recognize this…this thing that will affect my life in a way that sounds not so good?”

“Trust me, Mr. Steiner, it is much worse than bad. Soon, you will see a man slip into the alley next to Dinglemeyer’s Meat Market over there. Whatever you do, do not go into that alley—I beg of you. I can only do this once. Warn you, that is. If you go into that alley we will both suffer. You will…die, and I…I will have to live with guilt the rest of my life over having killed you.”

Steiner pushed his chair back in reaction to the holy man’s revelation.

“What? Having…killed me? How the hell—? I’m sorry. How is it you will…kill me?”

“That is all right, Mr. Steiner. I hear much worse coming from the middle school next to our temple.”

“And…about killing me?”

“Oh, no, not deliberately, Mr. Steiner. Not by my hand, sir. It will be an accident brought about by my foolish carelessness. You will die in a most vicious way, and I…I will have been the cause of it. Please, there is no time for more discussion, but consider carefully and seriously what I have told you.”

The man extended his hand across the table to Steiner. Steiner took it. It was incredibly hot. Why? Old guys hands were usually cool. They shook hands like old friends and the man said again, almost pleading, “Please, do not forget what I have said, Mr. Steiner. Do not go into that alley. Your life depends on it and, in a way, so does mine. Good TOWI rising, my friend.” He rose from his seat, turned, then walked away. There was a briskness in his step as he raced the sun.

“Yeah, yeah—‘Good rising’…or whatever. Weird old guy, but still…,” Steiner said to no one in particular.

Steiner watched as the TOWI holy man vanished into the crowd of people crushing and shoving their way to the intersection. All of them anxious to get out of that section of the city before the sun set. It was, after all, not the nicest place to be in the dark of night. Not since the gangs moved in and set up shop.

The nameless TOWI holy man moved against the flow of human traffic on the sidewalk as a salmon swims upstream to spawn in the quiet pools near the headwaters, then disappeared. Steiner moved his chair back up to the table, picked up the paper and pretended to be reading it. It was upside down. He didn’t care. He was puzzled, his mind filled with unsettling questions and no convenient answers were coming to him. Nothing that made any sense, anyway.

After a few aggravating minutes of trying to concentrate on a different subject; something else—anything else, he dropped the paper on the table in a show of frustration and disgust. He looked up just in time to see a man in a long gray cloak turn into the alley next to Dinglemyer’s. There was something odd about the man’s walk that triggered Steiner’s famed and insatiable curiosity. He tilted the half-full bottle and slid two tightly folded dollar bills under it, then wove his way through the Friday evening traffic toward the alley.

At the entrance, he stopped. He remembered what the mysterious old man in the gray toga told him moments before. He stood there, frozen, torn between his burning curiosity and a frigid warning. A buzzing noise, a flash, and a few crackles accompanied by a loud, tortured squeal issued from the darkness inside the tunnel with no top. A smell like the pungent odor of ozone that an old electric motor gives off while it’s running, only much stronger, wrinkled his nostrils. Then, everything fell silent, except for the noise of the traffic behind him and the insistent honking of a dissonant, wounded-cow horn that he knew was Rachel’s ancient VW. Well, this time she would have to wait.

A piece of one of the alley’s larger rodent residents rolled out and bumped to a stop at his feet. It appeared to have been torn apart and turned…inside out. Although it was a warm evening, Steiner shivered with a sudden cold that pervaded his body as the words of the TOWI holy man returned to him.

My God, that…that could have been me.

He turned and, once again, threaded his way through the traffic that was backing up because of a failed illegal left turn attempt at the clogged intersection. He reached his daughter’s car, out of breath. Rachel opened her window. He leaned down and planted a quick kiss on her forehead.

“And just where have you been, Papa?”

“Hi, Sweetheart. And you’re a fine one to be asking where I’ve been, Miss Never-on-time,” he said between short gulps of thick city air. “Listen, why don’t you go on home and I’ll see you there, later. Right now, I…I have a little side trip I need to make. I’ll be along soon, don’t you worry.”

His daughter frowned. “How will you—?”

“I’ll take the subway. Maybe a bus—or a cab. I’ll be okay.”

“Busses and subways are dangerous down here. Especially on the weekend after dark. And taxis are expensive and hard to find in this area on Friday nights, Papa.”

“I was raised in this neighborhood, remember? I’ll be fine.”

“This isn’t like you, Papa. What’s up? No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. You’ve found a new girlfriend?” she said, grinning weakly.

“No, Baby, nothing like that. I have a kindness to repay and I think…I just think I need to go to a TOWI temple this evening….”

“A TOWI temple? You haven’t been even close to a shul, much less a TOWI temple in twenty-five years. Why—?”

“You heard me, Babes. Now, run along home.”

---

“Your bungling is going to cost us one of these days, Gamnan.”

“There is nothing to worry about, Director. The TOWI guise had the indigenous beast completely fooled. It even thought I might be recruiting members for our—How do you say it?—religion.”

“I was not referring to the animal, you idiot. I am specifically talking about your casual approach to dimension bending and tinkering with the temporal fields. Flippant disregard for the rules. Rules that were carefully crafted to avoid what you may wind up doing if you don’t stop your tinkering. Our cover as another religious order is foolproof only because of their foolish willingness to accept such superstitions, but if anyone with the slightest amount of knowledge connected to an ability to think witnesses one of your botched antics, we will be exposed and you will be responsible for ruining the purpose of our mission. I will have no more of that, Gamnan. Do you understand?”

Another member burst unannounced into the room. He appeared breathless. His light blue lung sacks expanding in nervous little jerks on his sides.

“What is it now?” Director said.

“One of the outer guards just advised me that there is a local animal at the door. It says it wants to join us for the service tonight. What is a service, Eminent Director?”