Triptych

Next - Part I

BASIL WATCHED THE HOUSE blossom into view around the bend in the road, fancied he could see it emerging up from the curvature of the Earth, before he saw the name on the red-flagged mailbox.

He didn't have to read the name - faded brown from too-hot summers and biting winters, peeling away stubbornly from the corrugated tin - to know where he was. He recognized the solid two-storey sand-coloured brick edifice, the gingerbread porch and matching gables, the tenacious clinging ivy, the victory garden that was half the length of the front lawn, dark and rich.

Perhaps the vegetable garden was a bit smaller, now that the one who tended it was older, now that there were only two mouths to feed; perhaps the trees were slightly bigger; perhaps there was an empty dog hutch leaning lonely against the side of the porch stairs; perhaps the ruts on the laneway were a bit better defined, less filled with tire-crushed weeds, deeper grooves.

But nothing about the feel had changed.

It wasn't as if he could ever forget this particular house.

"Where it all ended," he whispered, chin propped on a palm, leaning his head out of the window to scent the fine late autumn air like a mutt. There were late apples and goldenrod on the breeze, and he sneezed into the crook of his sleeve.

"Or where it all started," Gwen muttered under her breath in response, eyes never leaving the narrow laneway she turned onto and set the U-haul truck crawling up. Either pot holes or reluctance had her tapping the gas lightly, and Basil wasn't about to put voice to his guess as to which it was.

"Depending on which side of it you're on, innit?" Basil agreed, calling to mind Evvie and Mark Pierson, young, newly married, parents of an infant barely old enough to chew - the woman Basil would one day love.

The woman who had...almost had...his son.

For them, the Piersons, for that baby Gwennie, it had been the beginning. The time and place where the whole world had gone utterly and completely wrong for twenty-four hours.

Would they, Basil wondered, feel the same sort of gale-force relief that Basil did? Now that the assassins had been stopped, the mole found and knowingly eliminated, the dead mourned? Or would they feel terror, confusion, having lived nearly thirty years knowing exactly what was to come and then suddenly knowing...nothing?

"Depending," Gwen echoed, and her knuckles on the oversized steering wheel were white.

Basil abandoned the window, the gently scented early morning breeze, and scooted across the seat. He leaned over the gear-shift and pecked a soft, dry kiss to her cheek.

"I'm here," he said.

"Here," she repeated, and the truck shivered to a hesitant stop, crunching the gravel under the tires, beside the gracefully age- drooped doors of the largest barn.

Yes, we are, Basil thought.

* * *

IN THE back of the rental truck, they had shovels and cheap disposable coveralls, a tarpaulin, a half-constructed wooden crate and lots of foam peanuts, a pair of overnight bags with changes of clothes, the clothing they had borrowed thirty years ago, and the letter of permission from the Institute to oversee this particular mission alone.

They had flown into Pearson International airport on Institute-pro- vided fake visas, landed in Toronto and rented a truck, bought the gear at a hardware store on the outskirts of the metropolis, and driven all night. Gwen had insisted on doing all of the driving. Basil had never driven on the right side of the road, and so didn't contest. He was fairly certain he wasn't in the mood to die in a horrible multi-car pileup on the highway, especially after he had survived...well, everything he had survived.